Tigers in the Lab

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For Asian-born scientists, a sense of duty, the tug of shared culture, the need to care for aging parents and a thousand other imponderables influence the decision to return. The recent wave of corporate downsizing and research cutbacks in the U.S. has also tipped the scales. A generous retirement package helped persuade Lee to leave his comfortable sinecure in Berkeley and take on the challenge of leading Academia Sinica. "Taiwan needs me," says Lee, "while to the University of California, it doesn't make that much difference whether I'm there or not."

But what ultimately wins over most wavering recruits is the sight of gleaming laboratories stocked with state-of-the-art equipment. In Taiwan K.H. Chen and his colleagues are using high-powered lasers to study ozone- destroying gases and films of sparkling diamonds. In Hong Kong engineers are fabricating computer chips in clean rooms that rival the very best facilities at U.S. universities. In Pohang, South Korea, scientists will soon start probing the structure of materials with a $180 million tool known as a synchrotron light source -- one of only half a dozen such machines in the world.

Although they have taken shape in the shadow of Japan, the scientific showcases of the Pacific Rim look for inspiration to California's Silicon Valley, where academics and entrepreneurs race to take ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace. In Hong Kong researchers are already working on projects for clients ranging from a small machine-tool manufacturer in Nanjing, China, to big multinationals like U.S.-based Motorola. Taiwan's scientists have taken on everything from vaccines to satellite communications, and many harbor even grander dreams. "In a few years," confides an aspiring biotechnologist, "I hope to start my own company."

But there is a danger in too narrow a focus on products and patents, warns Y.H. Tan, director of Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. While these may pay off in the short term, they are unlikely to yield the dazzling technological leaps that come from tackling fundamental problems in science. Tan's solution: continue supporting basic research -- like mapping the genes of the fugu, the poisonous blowfish prized by sushi chefs -- while at the same time prospecting for new drugs in Southeast Asia's flora and fauna for the British giant Glaxo.

Competition for openings in Asia's top research centers is keen. The Ph.D. he received from Indiana University wasn't good enough, jokes Huan Chang, now at Taiwan's Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences. "I had to go to Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow to get myself coated in a layer of gold." There is a frontier spirit in these fast-growing intellectual boom-towns that attracts job seekers with a taste for adventure. Calcutta-born Uttam Surana, an ambitious young biologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, turned down an offer from Germany's venerable Max Planck Institute to go to Singapore. "When you work with big people, you get overshadowed by their thinking," says Surana. "Here you can think your own thoughts."