At the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), where our laboratory is located, official lauguage is English. The members of ELSI are about half Japanese and half non-Japanese, so you can experience an environment similar to studying abroad while staying in the central part of Japan, Tokyo. Furthermore, here in ELSI, we do not focus on short-term goal-oriented research. Instead, we have enjoyed taking on a long-term challenge, using diverse knowledge such as electrochemistry, catalytic chemistry, biology and geology to solve one of the greatest mysteries in science - the origins of life.

To tackle the unsolved and hard question of the origins of life, we have focused on a single question: how geochemistry became biochemistry. More specifically, we are seeking for the general rule that governs both the mineral world and the living world. More than 100 years ago, the French biochemist Stephan Leduc pointed out that "Living things are composed of the same chemical elements as minerals: a living thing is the arena of the same physical forces as those that act on the inorganic world. The chain of life is necessarily a continuous one, from the mineral at one end to the most complicated organism at the other".  This is a remarkable insight into the origins of life, higlighting the continuity from geology to biology. The exciting question is how to find the similarity between them, and what scientific approaches are available to test experimentally the hypothesis. 

Our challenge to find commonalities between the mineral and biological worlds is also an attempt to find comon prinicples underlying seemingly disparate events. The importance of such multifaceted thinking is cited by many scientists as an effective way of fostering creativity.