It is gratifying to be able to say that, by any standard, 2004 has been a banner year for the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology. Established less than five years ago under the auspices of the Japanese government's Millennium Project research funding initiative, the CDB has blossomed into one of the world's foremost sites for the study of animal development and regeneration. It feels a bit unusual for me as the director of the Center to make such an unqualified statement of success, but the assessment is not mine alone. In June of this year, the CDB Advisory Council, a panel of ten eminent developmental biologists from around the world, met for its second plenary session to review the Center's performance to date and to make recommendations for the future. The process was intensive, with reviews of individual labs as well as a critical survey at the organizational level. Happily, the Council's findings were positive and encouraging and served to reinforce my own feelings that our young institute has gotten off to a remarkable start.

Of course the true measure of any scientific organization can be found in its research achievements; that, after all, is our raison d'être. In this sense, again, 2004 has been a fine year, with CDB labs publishing pioneering studies with far-reaching implications, from investigations of translational repression in Drosophila germline development to the explication of a timetable of gene expression useful for measuring the activity of biological clocks in mice. The diversity and depth of the year's achievements is reflected in the organization of this year's annual report, which has been redesigned to feature research highlights from the Center's labs in detail, while continuing to provide an overview of all active research and ancillary programs.

Publication in scientific journals, however, is only one aspect of the research endeavor. The opportunities that scientific seminars and meetings provide for the discussion of research with peers is at least as important to ensuring the quality of experiments and the rigor of conclusions, and provides an immediate forum for disseminating one's findings and receiving informed feedback. The CDB recognizes the value of scientific meetings and has strengthened the support mechanisms that allow our research staff to host individual speakers or organize more extensive programs of multiple talks. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of events hosted at the Center in 2004 that had an international focus, particularly meetings involving scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We look forward to the continuation of this trend in future years as a means of encouraging new relationships and fostering existing collaborations throughout the global developmental biology community.

RIKEN is one of Japan's largest taxpayer-funded research organizations, and as such is not charged with conducting educational activities as part of its mission. But science does not (and cannot) take place in a vacuum, and we view engagement with students and the lay public as an important role for the Center to fulfill. Affiliations with a number of local graduate programs in basic biology and regenerative medicine keep our labs open to grad students, many of whom joined us in September for a two-day intensive lecture program of talks and practicums conducted by heads of CDB labs. Our yearly Open House also drew a record of more than 1,600 visitors to the Center to take part in hands-on demonstrations, tour laboratories, and attend talks and exhibitions on developmental phenomena given by research staff with non-specialists in mind.

As we approach the end of the Millennium Project's five year term, we also enter a new phase in the CDB's history as an institute. Since the end of the last century, RIKEN has begun to move away from the tenure model of lifetime employment for many of its research positions, a policy conceived in the interests of encouraging mobility and keeping motivation levels high. The coming months will see the research programs appointed in the year 2000, the first year of the Center's existence, complete their initial five-year terms. Transitions will inevitably be made, in line with our vision of making the CDB an incubator for talent at all levels in the fields of development, regeneration and the science underlying regenerative medicine, which we hope will contribute to a larger virtuous cycle of opening up opportunities to gifted young scientists from throughout Japan and around the world.

The closing year has been one of many changes, the great majority of which, I believe, represented real progress. To those involved in the study of development, where constant change is the rule and evolution the ultimate outcome, perhaps that should come as no surprise. I hope you find this year's issue of the CDB annual report to be informative and wish you all the best for the year ahead.

Masatoshi TAKEICHI
Director, CDB