Thanks to SW, who alerted me to a letter in last week’s edition of Science. The critics are making more noise about the billions of tax dollars being spent on biomedical research in Singapore. Barely two months ago Science, the premier scientific periodical, ran a focus article on the growth of R&D in Singapore. Now, Cong Cao, a science policy analyst who had worked in Singapore previously, has written a critical letter dissecting the challenges facing “the Singaporean government’s ambitions to turn the city-state into a world-class hub of biomedical research”.

Cao’s criticisms can be summarized thus:

  1. Research is risky. A breakthrough can take a long time to achieve, and profitable applications are far from guaranteed. Cao writes, tellingly, that “It remains to be seen whether Singaporeans are ready to embrace uncertainties and tolerate failures.”
  2. Singapore lacks talent. Despite the A*STAR scheme and others, it will take at least 10 years to train properly educated, prominent researchers fresh out of high school. Cao questions the willingness of young Singaporeans to pursue “tedious benchwork” when more financially rewarding careers exists, and also writes “[I]n contrast to the United States, where the biotech industry has benefited from strong entrepreneurial efforts by academic scientists, their counterparts in Singapore, as civil servants, operate in a highly rigid, hierarchical system where moves between academia and industry are rare.” In other words, the civil service culture works actively against the cultivation of a biotech industry, which has survived in the US mostly because of, not despite, strong ties with entrepreneurial academics.
  3. The average Singaporean is ill-informed about the ethical aspects of current research. The recent growth in Singaporean research is at least partly opportunistic, in the sense that tough rules proscribing the extent of stem cell and cloning research in the US and other developed nations has help attract talent to Singapore. Obviously, the permissive Singaporean laws would attract talent that would directly benefit from it. But Cao writes, and this is worth quoting in full:

[S]ingapore’s advantage may not last if the research environment becomes more open in other countries. More importantly, there should be better opportunities for civil society in Singapore to debate the issues related to biotech research. Citizens have the right to know much more about the risks and benefits associated with the biomedical sciences conducted in Singapore than they do now. Public understanding is at least as important as deep pockets and a deep talent pool.

The last is the least tangible, and in a society indoctrinated to accept the virtues of Machiavellian pragmatism, perhaps the least appreciated. Ethics is something we as a society have to come to terms with on a collective level; it is too important an issue to leave to the specialists. Yes we have bioethics committees and the like to reign in aspiring mad scientists, but especially with work that tinkers directly with human life and our lives, it is not only researchers that ought to know what’s going on.

References

  1. Cong Cao, Science, “Making Singapore a Research Hub”, 316, 1423-4, 2007-06-08. doi: 10.1126/science.316.5830.1423
  2. Dennis Normile, Science, “Biomedical Research: An Asian Tiger’s Bold Experiment”, 316, 38-41, 2007-04-06. doi: 10.1126/science.316.5821.38