Word: stems
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...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...
...only getting better. 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...
...think Singapore punches well above its weight in this area," says Colman. "That's why I'm here." Another reason is Singapore's liberal regulations, which allow stem cells to be cultured from embryos up to 14 days old, although reproductive cloning is strictly illegal...
...small size, Singapore will never really threaten the U.S.'s overall biomedical muscle, nor is it trying to. But it's impossible to witness the buzz at Biopolis or meet scientists who have chosen Southeast Asia over Stanford and not wonder how much the U.S. could achieve in stem-cell research if it were as science mad as this city-state of 4.4 million. For all the hundreds of millions of dollars Singapore has devoted to high-tech lab equipment and recruiting top scientists from around the world, it is spending just as much to educate a homegrown core...