Nobel Laureate Tasuku Honjo on Choosing the Field You Should Pursue

Kyoto University professor Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Years earlier he delivered a lecture called “The Shortcut to Original Research: Aim to Be the Only One.” The core idea still feels urgent.

Honjo watched students chase whatever topic was fashionable. They believed they could outrun everyone else and take first place. His counterpoint is simple: when everyone runs the same race, the result is rarely original. “Don’t strive to be number one,” he wrote. “Think about how to become the only one.” UC Berkeley professor Patrick Hsu says it another way: the best researchers do not sit at the tail of an existing curve. They create a new curve the rest of us can now see.

You can put the idea to work without a lab coat. Start by listing the problems that bother you but seem invisible to everyone else. Pick one and live inside it. The beginning will feel slow because you do not have a crowd to copy. Keep notes. Share what you learn. The moment you can explain the messy corner clearly, people start coming to you for help.

Software trends make it easy to become a follower. Web3 yesterday, AI today, something else tomorrow. Yet there are still industries running on spreadsheets, teams with clumsy workflows, communities with no tools at all. If you become the only person solving a painful problem in one of those spaces, you gain leverage no hype wave can match. Honjo’s advice is a gentle shove toward the unmarked trail. It is lonely at first. Then the path opens and everyone else wonders how you saw it so early.