ABSTRACT
A laboratory produces its best results when its researchers are recruited and rewarded purely on the basis of their ability and performance. The assertion sounds rhetorical, but it ensues simply as a logical corollary of the credit cycle concept that has guided our study of Japanese science. The political economics of every industrial society skews its scientific community's recruitment and reward process away from pure credit cycle dynamics to some degree, resulting in various drains on talent. Sex discrimination may well be the most costly drain worldwide. The case of Japan's life science community lends particular weight to that suspicion, since women participate in large numbers but encounter severe obstacles to career formation. As organizational experiments in mobility, OBI and PERI have hosted women researchers whose competence and tenaciousness challenge the commonly held perception that Japanese women are passive and expendable commodities in the professional workplace.
