DAVID HARTUNG FOR TIME

BIO BOOMERS: Chinese biologist Sheng Huizhen returned from the U.S. to persue stem-cell research

Asia's Great Science Experiment
	A potent brew of talent, ambition and serious money are making the region a leader in innovation
	By Hannah Beech

Posted Monday, October 23, 2006; 20:00 HKT
Everywhere you look in this corner of Shanghai, there are mice. For Wang Zhugang, this is cause for great delight. After spending several years researching molecular medicine at New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Wang received a call from an official in his native Shanghai. Would he be interested in returning home? Wang initially declined. He was working for one of the world's top scientific institutions, and he recalled from his undergraduate days the wretched state of Chinese labs. The official presented a different vision: Wang would be given tens of millions of dollars to run a new state-of-the-art facility. A place at the best school in town would be reserved for his daughter. And, best of all, he would be given thousands and thousands of mice. In 2001, Wang founded the Shanghai Research Center for Biomodel Organisms, which in just five years has bred more than 100 types of genetically engineered mice to help decode diseases like cancer and diabetes. Next year, Wang will move into a new $25 million lab that will house 150,000 mice, compared to the mere 7,000 he keeps today. "My colleagues who stayed in the U.S. are still cooking in their labs, while I have the opportunity to run an entire research center," says the 45-year-old biologist. "If you move back to China, you have more room to develop your potential. It's a very exciting environment."

Could Asia be home to the next scientific revolution? We all know of the region's rich history of innovation—paper, the magnetic compass, a smallpox inoculation, even the number zero originated in Asia. In the first few millenniums of human civilization, no other continent could rival it. Yet China, which invented gunpowder in the 10th century, failed to adequately develop the technology and succumbed to Western cannons by the 19th century. As its rulers turned inward, the Middle Kingdom even abandoned the mechanical clock, which it had devised centuries before. India, despite a proud mathematical and astronomical tradition, also proceeded to slumber for centuries. Meanwhile, the West, with its Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and Space Race, became synonymous with scientific achievement. Many years ahead of the rest of the scientific pack, America, Europe and, more recently, Japan overwhelmingly claimed the economic fruits of innovation.

But the rest of Asia is now making up for lost time. Not content to subsist on the lowest rung of the technological ladder by churning out endless Christmas-tree ornaments and copycat computer parts, emerging Asian economies are tying their futures—and their national pride—to the miracles of science. It's not an impossible vision: Just look at how Japan transformed itself from a producer of cheap transistor radios to a world-class innovator. To foster their dreams, Asian nations have dramatically increased their government science spending: between 1995 and 2005, China more than doubled the percentage of its GDP invested in R&D, from 0.6% to 1.3%, while South Korea has raised its funding from $9.8 billion in 1994 to $19.4 billion in 2004. Such cash infusions have lured back many seasoned Asian researchers from the West, where science budgets are stagnating or, in some countries, even dwindling. (In the U.S., for instance, federal basic-research outlays for physical sciences and engineering as a percentage of GDP have been declining for the past 30 years, to less than 0.05% in 2003.) China alone has welcomed back 200,000 returnees, the majority of whom earned science degrees, since it began sending students overseas in the 1980s. The science push has already yielded results for Asia's developing economies: their share of global high-tech exports rose from 7% in 1980 to 25% in 2001, while the U.S. share declined from 31% to 18%, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. At the same time, the Asian share of all published scientific papers climbed from 16% in 1990 to 25% in 2004.

By 2010, 90% of all Ph.D.-holding scientists and engineers will be living in Asia, according to a prediction by the late Nobel-prizewinning chemist Richard Smalley, who died last year. That claim might sound outlandish, but already 78% of science and engineering doctorates are earned outside the U.S., and nearly one-third of those awarded in the U.S. go to non-Americans. In particular, Asians are targeting younger scientific fields that hold the potential for rich discoveries. Just a couple years after making nanotechnology a national priority, China became the second-highest contributor to nanotechnology journals in 2004. "Asia is becoming the next destination for innovation," says Sri Kumar, who returned from Chicago to Bangalore last year to set up a biotech venture-capital fund. "Look at all the cutting-edge firms in the U.S.: almost half the staff are Asians. And people are coming home now. With all the talent and training that's here, there's enough to start a revolution."

Continued...

	Stem Cells: The Hope And The Hype [Jul. 30, 2006] The debate is so politically loaded that it's tough to tell who's being straight about the real areas of progress and how breakthroughs can be achieved. TIME sorts it out Stem Cell Central [Jul. 23, 2006] American researchers--fed up with politics getting in the way of science--are packing up and heading to Singapore, which is delighted to have them Is the U.S. Losing Its Edge? [Feb. 5, 2006] America still leads the world in scientific innovation. But years of declining investment and fresh competition from abroad threaten to end its supremacy 10 Questions For Dr. Hwang Woo Suk [Dec. 05, 2005] TIME talks to the controversial South Korean cloning pioneer The New Ideas Labs [Jan. 23, 2005] As more firms send research to India and China, could the U.S. fall behind? More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine