Asia's Great Science Experiment—Page 2

Revolution isn't a concept usually associated with Singapore, with its manicured lawns and pristine shopping malls. But in 2000, the city-state decided to foment creativity by setting aside 200 hectares for a vast science park called One North, a reference to Singapore's latitude. The Field of Dreams approach to innovation—build it and the researchers will come—has met with its share of skeptics. But in just three years, the scientists at One North's lavishly equipped life-sciences hub, Biopolis, have been awarded 54 patents for everything from drug-loaded contact lenses and artificial-bone implants to a diagnostic kit for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Next year, Biopolis will be joined by the less catchily named Fusionopolis, a physics- and engineering-research base. Although Singapore has sent 500 science students abroad to pursue advanced degrees—at an average cost to the government of $380,000 per head—the island nation of 4.4 million is simply too small to rely on local talent to fill One North's laboratories. So Singapore has imported top foreign scientists like Sydney Brenner, a Nobel-prizewinning geneticist from the U.S., and Edison Liu, former director of clinical science at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (see sidebar). Pharmaceutical giants like Novartis and Eli Lilly have also set up research centers at Biopolis, as has an Australian stem-cell venture helmed by British cloning specialist Alan Colman of Dolly the sheep fame. "People are queuing up to come here now," says David Lane, a pioneering cancer researcher lured from Britain's University of Dundee in 2004 to head the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology at Biopolis.

If Singapore is the test-tube baby of Asian science—enjoying a perfectly controlled environment and regimented doses of cash—China is the hungry teenager with far grander dreams. Beijing's top leaders, nearly all of whom have backgrounds in engineering, announced plans in February to nearly double the country's current R&D spending of $29.4 billion a year by 2010. Much of the funding is flowing into fields where China believes it can make a long-term impact, either because the disciplines are relatively new (genomics and nanotech) or because progress in the West has been impeded by ethical concerns (stem-cell research and genetically modified crops). After years of political mistrust of science—Mao Zedong even denounced Einstein—China awarded more than 30,000 doctorates in 2004, up from 12,000 in 2001. The nation also graduated 200,000 engineers in 2004. Government incentives, like hefty tax breaks and prized spots at the nation's 100-plus new science parks, have attracted an army of returnees like mouse researcher Wang. "Sea turtles," as these prodigal sons and daughters are called, now make up an astonishing 81% of members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

This brain gain has accelerated China's science drive. In the last five years, a coterie of returnee researchers in Beijing has outpaced the competition in the U.S. and Japan by becoming the first to sequence the rice, silkworm, chicken and pig genomes. Meanwhile, Sheng Huizhen, a Chinese biologist who worked for 11 years at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), returned in 1999 to do stem-cell research in China because ethical considerations were making what she wanted to do nearly impossible in America. The Shanghai government, by contrast, gave her $875,000 to start a lab, now located in a makeshift space carved out of a converted kindergarten. Despite the lackluster surroundings, Sheng announced in 2003 that she had extracted stem cells from a hybrid rabbit-human embryo created from human skin cells and rabbit eggs. Although the results were not published in any top-flight international journal, a team of researchers in Britain announced earlier this year that it's trying to replicate her work. "This is an open field, and China is willing to allow you to experiment," says Sheng. "Coming back was too good an offer to refuse." Many of the 750 multinational R&D centers based in China—up from 200 in 2002—are also run by returnees. Innovations from these centers include enhancements of Microsoft's Web-search technology and Motorola innovations that allow users to snap pictures of business cards, automatically filing the information in the phone's database. The scientific breakthroughs have been so plentiful that the U.S. National Science Foundation set up a Beijing branch in May to monitor Chinese progress.

Beyond the returnee brain trust, a significant part of Asia's science boom relies on outsourcing by foreign companies. In India, a new biotech venture opens up almost every week. Although Bangalore-based Biocon, India's biggest science concern, is developing a new type of oral insulin, most Indian firms are focused on administering drug trials for Western companies or churning out cheap vaccines for diseases like measles and Hepatitis B. Costs for drug trials and production in India are roughly half those in the West. And there's a vast supply of people willing to take part in tests. "If there's any disease you're trying to produce a drug for, we have thousands, if not millions, of patients who have it in India," says N.S. Moorthy, vice president of clinical operations at Saneron, an American firm that's developing a stem-cell bank in partnership with Madras-based LifeCell.

It's not a bad strategy for India to start out this way, primarily relying on foreign money to educate the next generation of its scientists. "We need to build a base for innovation," says Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Biocon's chief executive and India's first woman billionaire. "We've found that the best way to leapfrog into innovation is as a partner." Biocon hopes to do just that with its oral formula for insulin, which it first worked on with a U.S. firm and is now developing on its own. There's every sign that this trend of foreign firms heading to Asia to drive down research costs will grow: more than half of the American respondents to a study this year by the Kauffman Foundation, an educational-research NGO, said they had either shifted or were planning to shift R&D facilities to India or China.

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