The nightmare known as the Bush Administration is proving too much for some of us...some of the best and brightest US scientists are packing up and moving out:
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SINGAPORE, Aug. 16 — You can’t buy Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in Singapore. But human embryonic stem cells? That’s a different matter.
Last month a local company, ES Cell International, claimed to be the first company to commercially produce human embryonic stem cell lines in a way that makes them suitable for clinical trials. Researchers can buy vials of stem cells from ES Cell over the Internet for $6,000.
Singapore, notably conservative on most social issues — including a ban on most types of chewing gum — is emerging as a hotbed for stem cell research, thanks to liberal laws in that field and equally liberal government financing...
...Bush administration policies that restrict federal money for stem cell research have prompted an increasing number of top scientists to pack their bags and head for this equatorial city.
Two of America’s most prominent cancer researchers, Neal G. Copeland and Nancy A. Jenkins, are planning to arrive here next month to take posts at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. The husband-and-wife team, who worked for 20 years at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, said politics and budget cuts had left financing in the United States too hard to come by.
“We wanted to be in a place where they are excited by science and things are moving upward,” said Dr. Copeland, who said he and his wife had already rented a condominium near Singapore’s shopping district and had joined the local American Club.
Scientists say President Bush’s veto last month of legislation to raise limits on federal financing for stem cell research was the latest in a series of setbacks, which they say are stifling the research environment and eroding the edge in basic medical science that the United States has held since World War II.
Shrinking research grants, a greater corporate emphasis on quick profits and the political firestorm over stem cells have left many American scientists frustrated and discouraged...In 2001, the same year President Bush first imposed limits on financing of stem cell research, Singapore snagged the National Cancer Institute researcher Edison Liu Tak-Bun...
...In 2003, Singapore lured Jackie Y. Ying from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she had become its youngest tenured professor ever, to head up its Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at Biopolis.
Earlier this year, Singapore scored another pair of Americans, the dean of the University of California, San Diego’s school of medicine, Edward W. Holmes, and his wife, Judith L. Swain. Dr. Swain was the school’s dean of translational medicine — the specialty of turning laboratory discoveries into practical drugs or therapies...
...scientists say the addition of Dr. Copeland and Dr. Jenkins is a particular coup for Singapore — and an equally severe blow to the American research community.
“This is a sad, and I think for U.S. cancer patients, a tragic loss,” said Irving Weissman, director of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine in California...
nytimes.com |
