Singapore makes push for biotechnology
Posted at 12:08 a.m. PDT Saturday, Sept. 8, 2001
BY DAN GILLMOR
Mercury News Technology Columnist
SINGAPORE -- If the United States wants to hobble its biomedical future by restricting research into stem cells, that's just fine with Philip Yeo. Singapore could use some more scientists, he says.
Yeo is leading a government-backed venture that could transform the economy of this tiny but prosperous island nation. The powers-that-be, of whom Yeo is one of the most influential, see biotechnology and biomedicine as a linchpin to Singapore's future -- and they've launched a multi-year push to make it happen.
Singapore is spending billions on new research facilities, and combing the globe for scientists and doctors to help staff them. The government is pelting young people with incentives to study science and medicine. It's luring foreign pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including some from Silicon Valley, to set up labs and manufacturing facilities.
In a sense, Singapore is trying something of a replay. It's deciding, in a typically top-down way, what economic fields it can enter with a competitive advantage and then sparing little effort or expense to succeed.
It'll be a decade or so before anyone's sure whether what worked for manufacturing, shipping and financial services will also work in bio-medicine. In the meantime Singapore is pushing telecommunications and other tech-related businesses.
But the emerging sciences of manipulating the very fabric of life are unquestionably one of the keys to humanity's future. If Singapore pulls this off it will be a world leader in a crucial arena.
Yeo, 54 isn't a scientist, or a doctor. He's an engineer. But his track record is extraordinary.
From 1986 until about a year ago, Yeo ran Singapore's Economic Development Board (EDB), the government body that successfully pushed, among other things, the development of high-tech manufacturing.
He's still co-chairman of the EDB. But his main job since August 2000 has been running the National Science and Technology Board, or NSTB, which has primary responsibility -- and an essentially unlimited budget -- for the biomedical initiative. The NSTB expects to spend at least $3.8 billion between now and 2005, and $800 million is going into a Biomedical Research Council.
In a sense, Yeo has been a student as much as a leader during that time. Besides his beyond-packed, travel-filled schedule as an official mover and shaker, he's been getting an amazing education. Singapore's top scientists and medical people have been tutoring Yeo on a regular basis, and he may have a wider grasp of biomedicine and its implications -- though, as he readily notes, not much depth -- than anyone else on the island.
In an interview at his office here, Yeo excitedly talks about Singapore's future and the biomedical project. Information technology, he says, is the old world, except to the extent that it can be used as a tool to boost new discoveries in other fields.
Information technology has a short product cycle, and a low barrier to entry in most cases. Hardware innovations, in particular, are quickly copied and turned into low-profit commodities. Singapore is a powerhouse in manufacturing disk drives and other high-tech gear, but there's every reason to think that lower-cost places like China will ultimately carve off a big chunk of this market.
Now consider biomedicine. It can take a decade in many cases to ``design and develop novel therapies,'' Yeo says -- that is, build an infrastructure, develop and test new therapies and then commercialize them. That dwarfs the lead time in information technology, he notes, adding that the successful players will have erected a serious barrier to entry.
``There's no way Michael Dell can do this,'' he says.
What Dell can do, however, is something that remains problematic in Singapore. Dell lives in a country where free thinking is emphatically part of a culture that spawns new ideas. Singapore's regime isn't oppressive in the classic sense -- this is a velvet-lined dictatorship -- but the weight of the government is everywhere.
As an election grows closer, for example, the government has imposed restrictions on politically oriented Web sites based inside the country. Recently, according to local reports, the government decided it would require overseas sites to register if they had Singapore-related political content that could be viewed inside the country.
This control-freakery can't possibly work in practice, just as the government's attempts to curb the availability of sexually-related and other material were ultimately more show than substance. Such persistent heavy-handedness only perpetuates the image of Singapore as a place where independent thought is considered worrisome, not valuable.
Can Singapore develop the kind of thinkers who make scientific breakthroughs? Yeo thinks it can. The government is offering financial incentives to students who go into preferred fields, for one thing, and has launched an advertising campaign to promote science.
``The problem is not money,'' Yeo says. ``The key is getting enough talent.''
The country has already attracted some stars. One important catch, Edison Liu, formerly director of clinical sciences at the U.S. National Cancer Institute in suburban Washington, who now heads Singapore's Genomics Institute.
Yeo offers more than good salaries to researchers who want to relocate. Singapore is building a massive new ``biopolis'' -- combining a science park, replete with state-of-the-art labs, retail and residences near the National University. Yeo says it'll be up and running in two years.
The Singapore biomedical initiative won't try to solve all of humanity's medical problems. It'll focus on several key diseases, including liver and breast cancer. And it will form partnerships with researchers in other countries.
President Bush's half-a-loaf decision on stem cells -- severely restricting the ability of U.S.-based scientists to receive federal research funding --was a boost to Singapore's own efforts in that area. ``If the U.S. government is silly on stem cells, I'll recruit people,'' he says.
Singapore already boasts one of the leading stem cell researchers, Sri Lanka native Ariff Bongso. Yeo sees this field as fundamental to the city-state's biomedical push.
Singapore is quite aware of the ethical questions raised by stem cell research, Yeo says, and cloning a human being isn't the aim. The real value, he says, is the possibility of growing compatible tissue to replace broken or diseased parts of the body.
Yeo's passion for this effort is evident as he draws pictures and charts on his office whiteboard. He takes me into a nearby room. It's floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with scientific and medical journals, books and other materials he's trying to assimilate in his crash study program. On the Saturday morning following our conversation he's getting a lecture on transplant immunology from Singapore's top expert in the field.
He sounds eager to pursue his homework, one piece of a huge challenge. If Singapore can succeed in biomedicine, it may pull off an economic miracle to rival the one that turned it from a third-world outpost to an ultra-modern city-state.
``This,'' he says, pointing to his books, journals and abbreviation-littered whiteboard, ``is the true knowledge-based economy.'' |
