Sarah Rothman | America may fall behind the research curve

As we speak, American scientists are packing their bags and moving to Singapore.

This past summer, Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, who spent 20 years performing research at the National Cancer Institute, have decided to move to Singapore, and they are not alone. When they arrive in Singapore, they will join the dean of the University of California, San Diego's school of medicine, Edward Holmes, and his wife, Judith Swain, who was the dean of translational medicine at UCSD. And the list goes on.

What's causing bright scientists to leave? What are they seeking in Singapore that they can't find here?

Money? Resources? Human embryonic stem cells? Maybe all of the above.

It turns out that Singapore, a country that still employs caning as a reasonable criminal sentence, is home to the first company to sell embryonic stem cells commercially.

Not only can you purchase embryonic stem cells in Singapore, but the government has recently poured huge amounts of money into creating their equivalent of our National Institutes of Health. In Singapore, it's called "Biopolis," and the reality is, it's just as high-tech and modern as the science-fiction name would have you believe.

Biopolis cost $290 million to build and houses five research institutes. A host of international scientific minds have been recruited for each institute; Edison Liu, former head of clinical sciences at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, is now the director of the Genome Institute of Singapore. Jackie Ying, the youngest person ever to receive tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is now the director of the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, also housed at Biopolis.

As for the company that sells embryonic stem cells commercially, the chief executive is Alan Colman, who worked on the team that cloned Dolly, the first cloned sheep, in 1996.

Has Singapore stolen our talent, and are we somehow falling behind in this country?

Christopher Scott, the director of the Program for Stem Cells in Society at Stanford University, cites empirical evidence of a real trend. In particular, he notes the loss of Holmes and Swain as an indication of the "chill on our biomedical research environment."

Scott pointed to results presented at a recent International Stem Cell Society meeting in Toronto: "The 'big' results came from [foreign institutions] - the biggest came from Japan."

Scott has serious concerns about the ramifications of losing American researchers to Singapore; he worries that a country other than the United States could be the first to commercialize embryonic stem cell therapies.

"If we force this research offshore, it won't be done as efficiently or as quickly, and American patients won't be the first to benefit from treatments," he cautioned.

But not everyone shares his anxiety.

James Sherley, a cell biologist at MIT, believes we will all benefit, regardless of what country or researcher makes big scientific breakthroughs.

If researchers in Singapore "make an incredible discovery, the rest of the world will benefit from that information," he said. Furthermore, he believes America has little to lose in this scenario. "It's not like there is something to be lost, other than the prestige. [This] country doesn't have to be concerned that we're losing scientists because we're being more thoughtful about responsible conduct in our research."

The problem is that only time will tell who is right - and by then, it may be too late. Though it's unclear how significant a biotech revolution we are facing, as a country, we're risking being left behind. This is a shame, because there is no end to our abilities in this country with the support of the federal government.

We split the atom, we landed on the moon, and we continue to discover better ways of diagnosing and treating many forms of cancer. But these results were only made possible by financial and moral support from the federal government.

Advocates of embryonic stem-cell research challenge "right-to-life" opponents by asking them who they would save in a burning in-vitro fertilization clinic: the embryos or a child who happened to be there?

While Americans take all the time in the world to debate the answer, the clinic burns and no one is saved.

Sarah Rothman is a fifth-year Bioengineering Ph.D. candidate and 2002 Engineering alumna from Fayetteville, N.Y. The Sounds of Science appears on Mondays. Her e-mail address is rothman@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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