Prof. IWAMOTO has visited China many times since 2003 and made significant contribution to the establishment of a collaborative agreement between the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the University of Tokyo (UT) which laid the foundation for the opening of the Sino-Japanese Joint Laboratory of Structural Virology and Immunology at the CAS Institute of Biophysics, and the Sino-Japanese Joint Laboratory of Molecular Immunology and Molecular Microbiology at the CAS Institute of Microbiology, under the Initiative for Global Research Networks on Infectious Diseases which was sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2005. The two joint laboratories, recognized in 2006 by both Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology as Sino-Japanese Intergovernmental S&T Collaboration Projects, have effectively promoted and facilitated research collaboration in the fields of microbiology, immunology and epidemiology over the past five years. In the past five years, the Japanese side has invested about 150 million RMB yuan in the two joint labs, and has sent five Japanese scientists to do research in China. During the same peoriod, several Chinese scientists have been working at the labs in Japan.