Nobel laureates excel at spotting fundamental problems and devoting years to solving them, even when it means challenging established authorities and accepted knowledge. That is the mindset Taiwan must learn if it wants to produce Nobel-level breakthroughs, says Academia Sinica President James C. Liao (廖俊智). In an exclusive interview with Storm Media, Liao set out the core principles he believes Taiwan's scientists urgently need to embrace.
His remarks come as Academia Sinica's “Taiwan Bridge Project” brings multiple Nobel Prize winners to Taiwan in collaboration with National Taiwan University, domestic research institutions and the International Peace Foundation. Since November last year, laureates in peace, physics, chemistry, biomedicine, economics and literature have engaged in intensive exchanges with local scholars and young researchers, offering Taiwan a rare, first-hand look at how Nobel-caliber science is actually done.
Learning to see fundamental problems, not just flashy results
For Liao, the “spirit of the Nobel Prize” lies less in glamorous outcomes than in how those outcomes are achieved. “Beyond seeing the brilliant research results of Nobel laureates, what matters even more is how they identify major problems, find the most fundamental issues and invest long periods of time to solve them. That is what most people find difficult to learn,” he said. “Through this lecture series, we hope Taiwan's students and teachers can experience how Nobel laureates originally identified problems and the spirit with which they solve them.”
The Taiwan Bridge Project's lecture series is deliberately designed to highlight the laureates' way of thinking rather than treat them as distant “knowledge authorities” dispensing correct answers. “Nobel laureates dare to challenge existing knowledge authorities,” Liao said. “When we invite them to Taiwan, we are not here to study under established authorities or simply learn what they know. The most important thing is to learn their spirit—that is the real gain.”
He emphasizes that persistence in the face of repeated failure is central to that spirit. “We need to understand how they dare to take on major scientific and social problems, why these problems differ from our current understanding and why experiments fail,” Liao said. “Most people retreat when they hit these obstacles. Laureates keep probing why they failed, and ultimately discover that existing knowledge is not enough. They then propose new theories—that is the true spirit of the Nobel Prize.”
Just as important, he added, is that these discoveries do not exist in a vacuum. “The major discoveries of Nobel laureates usually make significant contributions to society. That is another core element of the Nobel spirit.” In other words, the gold standard is not only intellectual daring, but also the ability to produce work that reshapes how societies live, heal, build and understand the world.
Room to fail—along with accountability
Turning from ideals to policy, Liao argues that Taiwan's current research environment does not yet give scientists the space they need to think big, take risks and fail along the way. “Taiwan needs to create an environment where researchers dare to try, conduct in-depth research and be allowed to fail, while still maintaining accountability,” he said. “It has to be an environment of respect, with appropriate competition, review mechanisms and accountability.”
The problem, in his view, is not a lack of talent, but a system that pushes researchers toward safe, incremental work that can quickly be counted, ranked and reported. “We hope scientific research will not chase short-term KPI indicators. If you are constantly asked about short-term performance, you cannot do deep research,” Liao warned.
He describes the policy challenge as a “large gray zone” that cannot be solved simply by relaxing standards or, conversely, tightening them. Instead, he calls for “an intelligent system” that avoids an obsession with near-term key performance indicators and instead enables truly long-term research. That means designing funding, evaluation and promotion mechanisms that recognize high-risk, high-reward projects and accept that not every bold idea will succeed—while still ensuring that public resources are used responsibly.
For Taiwan, the arrival of Nobel laureates under the Taiwan Bridge Project is more than a public relations moment. It is a mirror held up to the island's own scientific culture. Whether Taiwan can one day produce its own Nobel winners, Liao suggests, will depend less on individual brilliance than on whether the system as a whole can learn a difficult lesson: that genuine discovery often begins with the freedom—and the courage—to fail.
