What problem are you still trying to solve?

I certainly want to continue trying to understand how the global environment functions. The earth as a system is a very complicated one. And to understand it, we need very many disciplines, very many different scientists working together. I want to continue working with my specialty, which is chemistry, with the atmosphere. There is still much to learn about chemical reactions that occur out there in the air, in the atmosphere. So one of my projects now is to really learn more about this pollution that occurs in cities and that is spreading more through the globe. To learn it in enough detail so we can better tackle it, we can better come up with new ways of using energy, for example, that are not so damaging to the environment.

we know the fish, we know the worm, we know the fly, but we don’t know the links between and we don’t know, when we go back to the branches in evolution, we really don’t know what happened there when they branched and how they divert and what is the major drive for evolution.

we can select one gene out of those 20,000 genes, and completely destroy that one particular gene so that we can understand the function of that particular gene. I got very interested in that technology. It was 1992 or 1993 when I graduated from my Ph.D. school. So I decided to study — I decided to learn about knockout mouse technology. But at that time in Japan, only a few scientists were working on knockout mouse technology

Try to make better antibiotics. I’m not sure we can cure everything, that we can win the game against bacteria, but we can try to control it, to make the appearance of resistance more controllable. We can look for new antibiotics, not overuse antibiotics, not use antibiotics where they are not needed. If possible, if somebody has an idea for something completely new, I would love that.

I'm making cheap electricity,

They have a lot of extreme physics going on inside them and scientists use them to test theories of relativity on a cosmic scale. Einstein’s theories are checking out pretty well so far.