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That mastery will only deepen in the future. Nearly 400 years ago, the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon observed that the study of experimental science was the key to expanding man's horizons. The next wave of Asian technology will be built on that observation and the work of men like China's Zheng Zhipeng, who is probing the world of subatomic physics as director of the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider. And increasingly, Asia will be drawing on a resource that has been quietly steeping at universities and research institutes around the world: the tens of thousands of Asian scientists who are prominent at Western universities and research institutes, where they pursued basic research while their countries struggled to build auto factories. Now that their formerly impoverished homelands are wealthy and beginning to fund the laboratories that only the West could previously afford, a reverse brain drain is slowly bringing home_the native talent. |
Japan's Leo Esaki, who shared a Nobel in solid-state physics for his work on electron tunneling and who had spent most of his career in the U.S., returned to Japan in 1992 to become president of the University of Tsukuba, a national institution known for its science studies. Taiwan's Yuan T. Lee also shared a Nobel in the U.S. (at the University of California, Berkeley) for developing methods to track chemical reactions; he now heads Academia Sinica, a collection of 22 research institutes in Taipei. Both men, and many like them, are determined to transplant the same respect and commitment to scientific research that they enjoyed in the West. In the end they will win supporters, if not for love of the purely scientific, then for the spin-offs that basic research eventually provides.
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