If he had been a researcher at a major Japanese university, Koichi Tanaka could not have won the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
That is the claim of his employer, Shimadzu Corp., a Kyoto-based precision equipment maker that says it excels in nurturing researchers of the highest caliber.
Tanaka won the Nobel for developing an innovative method of analyzing life-forming proteins, a discovery paving the way for early cancer diagnosis. Tanaka was Japan's first researcher to win a Nobel Prize while on the payroll of a private Japanese company.