Singapore has made further advances in its effort to become a recognized center for biomedical science with the recruitment of senior researchers and their teams from the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, and the appointment of two prominent scientists from US organizations to its International Advisory Committee (IAC). Singapore aims to become not only the hub of biomedical research activity within Asia, but to attract scientists who might otherwise work in US laboratories.
Annual output of smaller industrialized nations of the Pacific Rim. Source: ISI's National Science Indicators
Edison Liu, former director of the US National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Division of Clinical Sciences, moved to Singapore this summer to head up the newly created Genome Institute of Singapore. He takes with him microarray specialist, Lance Miller. Gunaretname Rajagopal moved from the University of Cambridge in July to become Acting Director of the country's new Bioinformatics Institute. And in April 2002, the director of the Institute for Virus Research at Kyoto University, Yoshiaki Ito, will move to a joint position as Professor of Medicine in the University of Singapore and an investigator at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB). He is taking eight members of his laboratory with him.
Meanwhile, Arnold Levine, president of Rockefeller University and Samuel Barondes, director of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, have joined Singapore's Biomedical Sciences IAC. Created 12 months ago and chaired by Sir Richard Sykes of GlaxoSmithKline, this committee lists a powerful line-up of internationally recognized experts such as David Baltimore (California Institute of Technology), Philippe Kourilsky (Director of the Pasteur Institute), Hans Wigzell (President of the Karolinska Institute) and co-chair, Sydney Brenner (Salk Institute for Biological Sciences).
Barondes has agreed to join the IAC because he's "fascinated by Singapore's plan to become a major Asian player in this area," and would like "to get an inside view of how they plan to pull this off." He says he's attracted by other members of the IAC, especially Brenner, and says that it's a "worthwhile endeavor because Singapore's special circumstances will promote some important contributions. For example, they have less constraints on stem-cell research than the US."
The push to develop a biomedical research base in Singapore is fierce. Since announcing last year that this discipline was the fourth pillar of its economy—the existing three being electronics, chemicals and engineering—the government has not only pulled together an outstanding IAC but has committed to the creation of a new science park called the Biopolis (to be finished in 2003), has established new institutes for bioinformatics and genomics, and in September, it staged its first international biomedical conference, BioAsia. Plus, it has attracted several international pharmaceutical companies to build manufacturing plants at the tip of the island and by 2010, the country's target is to have "15 world-class companies, and to be the region's center for clinical trials and drug development."
For Liu, whose center will combine cell biology with genomics, the opportunity to have "an impact on an entire country's research" was a large part of the attraction. "Singapore is pursuing medical research not only for public health goals but also as a means of increasing public prosperity," he told Nature Medicine. "This is the first time that Asia is relatively free of imperialism, famine and genocide. Since the 1400s the world GDP shifted from East to West and now it's shifting back somewhat, so it's good to be part of this unusual time in history when Asia is reemerging." He has a six-year contract to run the genomics institute
Ito told Nature Medicine that at an age where he faces compulsory retirement from research in Japan, he is more than happy to move to an English-speaking country where his research can be pursued as he desires. "Having heard that the only thing they expect me to do is good research that is supported by the institute, it was an irresistible offer." His research focus is a family of mammalian RUNX genes—named runt-related for the segmentation genes in drosophila. RUNX1 is essential for hematopoiesis and is the most frequent target of chromosome translocations in acute leukemia; RUNX2 is essential for osteogenesis and Ito's group has discovered that RUNX3 is implicated in molecular mechanisms of carcinogenesis.
Situated at the geographical crossroads of Thailand, Indonesia, China, Malaysia and India, Singapore is a prosperous country and is also English speaking, two factors that the government promotes when attracting foreign scientists. "I wouldn't say that funding is unlimited," says Thomas Dick who joined IMCB in 1990 and now runs the mycobacterium biology lab, "but I haven't reached the limit yet." Dick had planned to return to Germany five years ago, but after talking with colleagues there he realized that his research conditions in Singapore were unbeatable. For example, the only delay in obtaining new equipment is determined by how quickly it can be delivered from the manufacturers rather than whether its use is approved by a grant-giving body. Dick is keen to point out that all research programs are reviewed by the IAC every three years.
But money is not everything and being able to recruit staff from a good pool of PhDs and post-docs is crucial crucial since, as Brenner articulated in his opening address at the BioAsia conference, "human talent is the greatest asset of knowledge-based industries. It is here that Singapore falls down. IMCB Director, Chris Tan, says that the tough standards for obtaining a PhD at his institute—namely publication in a top-tier journal—means that the institute produces only a handful of PhD students each year. "The size of the scientific community in Singapore is much smaller than in Japan," admits Ito, "but despite the fact that there are more internationally recognized scientists in Japan, it is still a closed country and the scientific community is oriented inward. By comparison, Singapore is more flexible and stimulating". Ito believes that the region needs to create a new network among Asian countries with its own academic centers of excellence. "I know many Asian scientists who share this view,." he says.
Barondes also acknowledges the lack of a sufficiently large local post-doc pool. "[Singapore's] main drawback is small size—even smaller than Israel, which is doing well in [biomedical research]. So Singapore must try to develop niche areas and certainly needs to train more people at all levels. They are prepared to invest money to do this. They may well shift some of their technical labor force from other scientific areas."
According to ISI data for the period 1996−2000, Singapore is best at molecular biology in which the average impact of its publications is 18% above the world average, compared, for example, with immunology and neuroscience, which are 55% and 50% below average, respectively.
Another field in which Singapore does well is agricultural science where its research papers rate 8% above the world average in terms of impact. However, this discipline has all but been removed from the country's research spectrum with the September "merger" of the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology and the IMCB to create a new organization, which will help to "...achieve a critical mass of research scientists and capabilities, so that the institutes can more effectively take biomedical science research to a higher plane."
Karen Birmingham was a guest of the Singapore National Science and Technology Board at BioAsia.
