Singapore Wants You!
An offer bioscientists can't refuse: unrestricted research, top-notch equipment, limitless funds. (Just leave your chewing gum at home.) By Stuart Luman, Wired.com
Jul 29, 2004

Eight years ago, Alan Colman and his team of geneticists stunned the world when they cloned a sheep. Dolly became a household name, and Colman found himself in the spotlight.

He made appearances on NBC, CNN, and the BBC, and landed more than a hundred invitations to lecture in front of audiences around the globe: Islamic scholars in Dubai, philosophers at Oxford University, biotech conferences in Delhi and Bangalore.

Suddenly Colman, who was working in Edinburgh, had his pick of prestigious academic posts and private research labs across the Western world. He turned them all down.

Instead, he packed up his life and moved to the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, where he is now sitting, explaining his next big project over a tuna sandwich.

The 55-year-old scientist hopes to create insulin-producing stem cells, which he'll use to treat diabetics, freeing tens of millions of people from a lifetime of needles and glucose monitoring.

Before Colman came to Singapore in 2002, his plan was just a lofty goal in need of funding. Then Singapore dangled a US$6 million grant if he'd agree to relocate.

"I met with venture capitalists in the US and the UK and realised that it would be very difficult to fund the work I wanted to do," he explains.

"But Singapore was prepared to put money into it. They're not just interested in conventional returns on investment; they're taking a long-term view. It really wasn't a difficult decision."

Colman's not alone. Singapore is treating hundreds of scientists like free agents, promising first-class laboratories, top-notch equipment, and more than enough money to pursue work that's not fundable, or is too controversial, back home.

The government is investing more than US$2 billion into research of all stripes, hoping to attract leaders in therapeutic cloning, drug discovery, cancer research, and other areas, bioscience all-stars who will in turn help build a local community that will bolster the economy.

So far, it's working.

A third of the almost 4,000 science PhDs here are foreigners, many with impressive résumés. Edison Liu, former director of the US National Cancer Institute's Division of Clinical Sciences, moved in 2001 to head the Genome Institute of Singapore.

Japanese cancer researcher Yoshiaki Ito brought his entire Kyoto University team to Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in 2002.

Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Sydney Brenner splits his time between the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and advising Singapore on how to attract more people like him.

The government has also been successful in luring multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Together, Singapore and Swiss pharmco Novartis founded the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases.

With a 10-year, $120 million budget, scientists at the centre will work to rid the developing world of scourges like tuberculosis and dengue fever, a tropical disease that infects 50 million annually.

TB kills nearly 2 million every year, mostly in poor regions. Neither disease has received much attention from drug companies. The government is working with Novartis to change all that.

Exhibit A in Singapore's quest is Biopolis, a $300 million, 2 million-square-foot complex taking shape just outside of downtown.

When complete by year's end, Biopolis will include institutes specializing in bioinformatics, genomics, molecular biology, and nanotech - not to mention a shopping mall, a fitness center, restaurants, a day care centre, lecture halls, a pub, and a light-rail system.

The gleaming food court features local delicacies like chicken rice and laksa soup, Indian fried bread, a Malay beef dish called rendang - and Wi-Fi. The main lobby is set off with white Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs and an Achille Castiglioni floor lamp.

But it isn't the food or the furniture that lured Martin Hibberd from his tenured post at London's Imperial College to run the population genetics lab at the Genome Institute. It's the equipment.

Biopolis labs are lavishly outfitted with mass spectrometers, robotic microarrays, and a computing room that can house a petabyte of data storage. On a tour of his facilities, Hibberd proudly notes the $600,000 sequence variation analyzer purchased by the government. The system can sequence 4,000 DNA samples a day. Then there are the four $400,000 Applied Biosystems DNA analyzers. "At Imperial, it was hard to get funding for new technology, but here it's available," he says. "We've gone from nothing to this in only a short period of time."

Of course, there are trade-offs for scientists who choose to live and work in Singapore - a country that treats chewing gum like contraband, canes graffiti artists, and executes drug dealers.

Such top-down control extends to the scientific community. In exchange for funding, researchers effectively become on-call consultants, expected to help on various problems of the day in tandem with local scientists.

Colman spends 20 percent of his time doing government-sponsored work and recruiting scientists.

During the 2003 SARS outbreak, Hibberd's boss asked him to sequence the virus. He developed a diagnostic test, now sold by Roche Pharmaceuticals, and will split royalties with Roche and the government.

"In the UK, an academic institution would look down on that," Hibberd says. "Here, I'm totally open."

By working in the biotech community, foreign scientists will train an emerging generation of Singaporean researchers, who will one day rule Biopolis.

At least that's the plan. Getting to that point requires an overhaul of the educational system, which has always been based on rote memorisation and absolute respect for authority.

For many countries, this would take forever, but things happen more quickly here.

"Singapore works as a company," says Denmark-born Søren Bested, CTO of CordLife, which banks stem cells from the blood of umbilical cords.

"When a decision is made to support life sciences, the government can provide billions in funding, build 2 million square feet of life science space in the middle of town, and change the curriculum of all schools to incorporate it."

The bigger obstacle may be cultural. The government is suddenly encouraging a type of creativity that it has all but purged from this hermetically sealed country.

"People have had a very good deal here, but unfortunately compliance is part of the problem for the future. They don't think for themselves," says Colman. "This runs through to science."

The man responsible for setting Singapore's economic course: Philip Yeo, cochair of the Singapore Economic Development Board.

Having watched electronics manufacturing and financial services flee to China and Taiwan, Yeo sees biotechnology as a way to keep the city-state's economy afloat.

"If the whole world market for electronics or chemicals shrinks, oops, we're in trouble," he says. "Biotech is one more weapon."

It's an expensive gamble. By one estimate, US$60 billion worldwide has been lost in private biotech investment since 1990.

Yeo doesn't seem worried. Officially, the country has US$100 billion in cash reserves. Unofficially, the number is much higher, perhaps double. "Money is not a problem," he says. "My problem is people."

In his search for world-class microbiologists, chemists, geneticists, and the like, Yeo has given his pitch hundreds of times.

Yet he still gets excited about the change he's inciting. He jumps up from the table in a Biopolis conference room and starts writing on the frosted glass walls.

Biopolis, he explains, will be a creative environment where Western scientists and an emerging class of Singaporean researchers will work side by side.

"Anyone can build a building. But to do this" - he points to his scribbles describing a massive scholarship program - "the selection, the marketing to the kids, that's our competitive edge. I'm looking for future leaders."

After an hour, Yeo has covered nearly every inch of the glass drawing board in charts, pyramids, and Venn diagrams. He admires his handiwork and turns back to me. "This is the only place you can graffiti," he says with a laugh. "Elsewhere you go to jail!"
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