President of the JSME
Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo
Everything has been carried out very intensively to renew the Microbes and Environments. It was two years ago when the editorial board has decided to change the style of the Microbes and Environments completely to an English edition and to an On-line journal. Since then, many editorial and secretary staffs have begun to struggle with this fairly hard job. Many meetings and exchanges of letters or E-mails led step by step the flame of the new form of the journal vivid. The editorial board has become international and four distinguished foreign editors have joined to the committee. The cover page of the journal has been changed to more attractive and the size of the space has been made larger. The instructions for authors has been changed and become more precise and informative. Finally, everything has been finished until the end of the 20th century.
We have now the new Microbes and Environments at hand with faint smell of printing ink. At the same time, contents of this journal have widely been sent over the ocean by an internet system. Everyone in the world, who is interested in microbial ecology, can touch the information put out from our society. The 21st century is such an age when every scientific knowledge is held as a public property so promptly. We can send valuable original messages to all over the world using this fresh media, and can contribute to create a new concept about microbial ecology and a new technology to analyze the way of living in microorganisms.
In the past 20th century, the increase of human population and the development of modern technology have damaged our planet seriously, although we have been able to make our life more comfortable using newly developed technology. We are now facing to environmental pollution, shortage of foods and other materials, greenhouse effect by carbon dioxide, and so on. Warning for the forecasted collapse of natural environments has loudly been given. In the 21st century, we human beings should revive our planet for us to survive. Then, how to do it? Many people believe that the 21st century will be the age of biotechnology where microbial ecology will contribute much. Application of hitherto accumulated knowledge and techniques in microbial ecology to revive our poor planet is eagerly expected. Microbes have sustained the earth from its early stage of birth by helping the surface soil formation and plants habitation, while they themselves have competed and, on the other hand, helped each other. We have studied much about their behavior, still we should know their life more precisely than before using newly developed techniques in molecularbiology, genomics, and proteomics. And thus accumulated a huge amount of up to date scientific data will be analyzed using in silico technology such as internet. For that, our new Microbes and Environments could be very useful and highly efficient. I believe that this journal will insert much more numbers of papers and be published more frequently. Let's put Microbes and Environments to a good use to revive the precious environments of the earth.