I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place. I believe the Infosys story is living proof of this. Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.

I don’t know. That’s a terrible answer I realise, and everyone wants a nice straight forward answer. I think everyone, all scientists, have these kind of wacky ideas along the way, and some of them work and some of them don’t work. And this was one that, you know, came and was successful and went forward, and again it sounds obvious to say we were lucky – but we were lucky, you know, there’s way more ideas fail than ever succeed, and this was one that, you know, we were very excited about at the beginning, we thought it had a very low probability of success, but it took off, and it took off like gangbusters. That was wonderful to see.

I was prepared to fail. I was prepared to not be able to get things accepted, because I saw that happen to my mother.

And so I finally felt that I’d given up. ... And towards the morning, I started thinking, “Well, failure is actually what most people experience in boxing.” ... And I found a way to write about the whole sport by way of beginning with failure, with the image of failure.

I strongly feel that this is, that I am able to receive this award because of John Gurdon and also many other researchers in the field. This field has a long history, starting with John Gurdon. So I feel very lucky. I may have played some important role in this long history, but it was not myself who initiated this field. So that’s my feeling right now.

So I think failure is important in my career.

In Japan, however, I found myself suffering from Post America Depression or PAD. The environment for researchers in Japan was quite different in many ways from that in the U.S. At the medical school, very few scientists showed interest in the basic biology of mouse ES cells, and there was little thought-provoking discussion with my colleagues. Some of my colleagues advised me to work on something more related to medicine. Furthermore, I could not get enough funding and had to change the cages of the numerous mice by myself every week. What was worse, the Nat1 work was being rejected by many journals. I felt lonely and depressed, and I was about to give up my career as a scientist and return to the path of physician.

my second failure in my career. But that second failure got me interested in knockout mice, mouse technology. So I think failure is important in my career

A book also pushed me to become a medical doctor. I was deeply inspired by Torao Tokuda, a physician who founded a hospital group in the 1970s that tried to revolutionize the Japanese medical care system.

Running CiRA with some 250 staff, I have come to spend less time discussing their data with my colleagues and students, and have been absorbed by my duties as the "chief executive officer" of CiRA, including devising strategies to advance both basic and applied research and to obtain sufficient funding. Anxious about the lack of financial resources for the future to allow us to continue hiring research support staffers, I even ran the full Kyoto Marathon in 2012 to raise online donations from the public. It was hard but helped us raise more than 10 million yen.