The problem is that science in practice tends not to work well that way -- institutions typically lease out or share tools or lab space. Like, there are several different teams buying cargo space on the Space Shuttle, or leasing time on the big radio telescope at Arecibo. Same thing happens with lab work. But with the current ban, any of these private enterprises are crippled because they can't lease the space or the tools that other private enterprises can.
Which is why the latest Time magazine can run this story.
Here's a couple quotes from the part you'd have to subscribe to read.
Over the past six years, Yeo has been roaming the world, trailing talented scientists in Washington; San Diego; Palo Alto, Calif.; Edinburgh and elsewhere, and spiriting them back to his home country of Singapore. Like any proud collector, Yeo never tires of ticking off his most prized trophies: former National Cancer Institute star Edison Liu, American husband-and-wife team Nancy Jenkins and Neal Copeland, British cancer researcher David Lane. "I'm a people snatcher," he says unashamedly.
What distinguishes Yeo from other kidnappers, of course, is that his targets go willingly. They happily relocate to Singapore's new 2 million-sq.-ft. Biopolis research center, where they can concentrate on one thing they can't always study so easily back home: stem cells.
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The idea that buttoned-up Singapore, better known for punitive caning and a onetime ban on chewing gum, should emerge as a center of enlightenment seems unlikely. But the government sees both scientific and fiscal promise in the biomed field. This month, Singapore announced a doubling of its R&D budget, to $8.2 billion over the next five years, making it a regional research hub, particularly in stem cells. That's attractive to frustrated American scientists--and worrisome to people who want to see the U.S. retain its scientific edge.
"I think there is a risk of a brain drain, and we are seeing it," says Christopher Thomas Scott, executive director of the Stanford Program on Stem Cells in Society. Yeo, for one, is blunt about taking advantage of the American political climate. "I go to the U.S., and I tell those scientists, Come to Singapore and finish your work," he says.
Singapore's leadership in stem-cell research is not new. In 1994, Ariff Bongso, a Sri Lanka--born embryologist at the National University of Singapore, became the first person to isolate human embryonic stem cells, and in 2002 he discovered a way to grow stem-cell lines without the use of animal cells, which could make it easier to find clinical uses in human beings. Bongso achieved those breakthroughs nearly alone, but that would not be the case anymore, thanks to Biopolis, the government's $300 million bet on bioscience.
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Late last year the government launched the Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, chaired by Cambridge University--based stem-cell scientist Roger Pederson, which will set aside $45 million for research in the field over the next three years. Money also comes from university grants and offshore organizations like the U.S.-based Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. The diabetes group has helped fund biotech start-up ES Cell International (ESI), home to Briton--and now Singapore resident--Alan Colman, who was part of the British team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996. ESI manufactures its own embryonic-stem-cell lines and is working on shaping those cells into insulin-producing pancreatic tissue and cardiac muscle, which could be given to patients suffering from diabetes or heart disease. It's exactly the kind of potentially profitable research Singapore wants, and the company hopes to begin clinical trials next year.
So, this is how private industry is researching stem cells.
By going to Singapore, where the government is happy enough to provide funding.
Since before the Manhattan Project, the U.S. managed to ensure its position in the world by doing exactly this sort of thing with various breakthrough technologies -- recruiting computer scientists, atomic physicists, rocket engineers, and so on. Not so any more.
We might be (as that New Scientist article says) training the scientists, but without the support and permission of the federal government, the best of them are going elsewhere. |
