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438hospital. Since the gap between the clinical and basic realm seemed smaller in hematology than in hepatology I was studying, I said to him, “You are lucky to be a good physician-scientist.” However, he said with some embarrassment, “I am a pseu-do-scientist.” Since then, I have come to think about why physicians working in clinical field need to study basic science. After graduating from Hamamatsu University School of Medicine four decades ago, I spent two years as a resident, mainly at Juntendo University Hospital, Tokyo. At the last part of my residency, Dr. Sumio Watanabe, who was my clinical instructor and later Professor and Chairman, advised me to work with him in the Department of Gastroenter-ology. He was just back to our university from the laboratory of Dr. James Phillips, University of Toronto, where he studied the mechanism respon-sible for bile canalicular contraction in liver. I then started to study cell-cell communication between hepatocytes as a graduate student of Dr. Toshihiko Namihisa, Professor and Chairman. Like any other students, I had limited time to experiment because I also had several inpatients at the hospital. The experiment started in the late afternoon, continued to midnight, and was sometimes interrupted due to sudden changes of inpatients. In the late summer of 1987, Dr. Namihisa asked me if I would like to study biliary transport in the laboratory of Dr. Irwin M. Arias, Professor and Chairman of the Physiology Department, Tufts University in Boston. As the new life in the States seemed stimulating and attractive, I at once accepted it. There are a lot of good memories while my staying in Boston for three years. Transport research was interesting, and new findings were exciting. I am very grateful to Win, Dr. Irwin M. Arias, professionally and privately. He several times invited me to go fishing (Figure 1), which I had not experienced before. In the summer evening, we went to the Fenway Park Stadium to see the Red Sox game. Everything was amazing, and I and my family greatly enjoyed our life in Boston. He later moved to NIH (National Institute of Health, Bethesda) and is active in his research and educa-tion. He will celebrate his 95th birthday in September this year. Win is a distinguished scientist and hepatologist: he is the founding editor of HEPATOLOGY, the official journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and has contributed signifi-cantly to the founding and development of the American Liver Foundation (ALF). The Annual Irwin M. Arias Symposium supported by ALF will celebrate its 30th anniversary this year. He is not only an excellent scientist, but also a great teacher, who has advocated the importance of bridging the gap between basic science and clinical medicine. In 1989, he published the article in the New England Journal of Medicine, titled “Training Basic Scien-tists to Bridge the Gap between Basic Science and Its Application to Human Disease”1).In this article, he states as follows: The objective is to recreate the "golden era" of the 1950s and 1960s when an academic physician could be a "triple threat" — clinician, teacher, and biomedical scientist. At present, this objective is not as enthu-siastically sought or as frequently attained. The chief reason is that each component has become a full-time job, largely because of the increasing complexity of medical practice, the growing demands of teaching, and the rapid pace of biomed-ical research1, 2). He further raises a question: Should we direct efforts exclusively to recreating the triple-threat medical academician of the past? Are we missing other opportunities to bridge the gap between biologic science and medicine? I believe Figure 1　Fishing in Boston