ASIA PACIFIC RESEARCH INTEGRITY
NETWORK MEETING 2023 TOKYO

Asashima received his Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo in the field of Developmental Biology. After receiving his degree, he engaged in education and research as research fellow at Free University of Berlin in Germany, and professors at Yokohama City University, The University of Tokyo, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tokyo University of Science and Teikyo University in Japan. During these, he was the first in the world to identify a mesodermal inducing factor as an Activin protein. When Activin is given to undifferentiated cell mass of vertebrates such as frogs, it has succeeded in forming various organs and tissues in a concentration-dependent manner. Activin and RA, which he identified as inducing factor, were shown to cause pancreas, kidney, heart, gut etc. differentiation even in mouse ES cells. He won several prizes such as Siebold Prize(1994), Toray Science Prize(1999) ,Imperial Special Prize and Japan Academy Prize(2001)etc. He held a research ethics symposium when he was the vice president of the Japan Academy of Sciences, and created the first research ethics text book “Green Book” with Dr. I.Ichikawa as FA in 2015, when he was a board member of JSPS ( Japan Society for the Promotion of Science ). He has been the President of the APRIN ( Association for the Promotion of Research Integrity ) Foundation in 2016 to this day.