What kind of planet is the Earth? The Earth has an atmosphere and oceans, and the fact that life exists on it is its greatest characteristic. So how did the Earth become a celestial body full of life? Are there any other celestial bodies in the universe that can nurture life like the Earth? Answering these questions will be the greatest goal of not only earth and planetary science but also natural science in general in the 21st century. 　As a result of 40 years of planetary exploration, we now know that there are several life-bearing bodies in the solar system. The icy satellites Europa and Enceladus have vast liquid oceans and submarine volcanoes beneath their icy crusts. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has been found to have a thick degassing atmosphere composed mainly of nitrogen, with lakes of liquid methane and meteorological phenomena involving evaporation and rainfall on its surface. Furthermore, the possibility of discovering life outside the solar system is now rapidly expanding. The development of telescope technology has led to the discovery of more than 2,000 candidate planets outside the solar system, and in the near future we may be able to observe the distribution and probability of the existence of planets of Earth's mass in the universe, the composition of oceans and atmospheres, and even discover signs (biomarkers) of the existence of life. In this talk, I would like to introduce some of the latest attempts to find life in the universe.

　When Nelson Mandela became President of the first democratically elected government of South Africa in 1994, one of his first priority acts was to When Nelson Mandela became President first democratically elected government of South Africa in 1994, one of his first priority acts was to strengthen science education especially for the country's black population who had been denied 'equal' opportunity to study science under the apartheid regime. He asked the Japanese government to provide technical assistance for improving secondary science teaching. This presentation gives an account of how the Japanese team of science educators went about this task, developing along the way an 'experience-sharing' model of technical cooperation. This model is characterized by a symmetric relationship between the technology supplier and recipient, centrality of the learning function and importance of managing the cultural factors. This model is characterized by a symmetric relationship between the technology supplier and recipient, centrality of the learning function and importance of managing the cultural factors. The presenter served as the head of the Japanese technical cooperation team from 1999 to 2006.

　In recent years, remarkable progress in medicine has opened the way for the practical application of regenerative medicine and gene therapy. Looking at the development of pharmaceuticals, there are high expectations for nucleic acid drugs as the next generation of drugs to the antibody drugs that are currently attracting attention. The issues to be solved in the practical application of nucleic acid drugs are the improvement of the stability of nucleic acid derivatives in vivo and their delivery. In this lecture, we will introduce the latest chemical approaches to overcome these problems.