Sg gain fr US stem cell policy
-
Republicans say Bush's veto is risky:
2.Sg already gained fr US no funding policy.
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 20, 6:48 AM ET,2006
WASHINGTON - After waiting 5 1/2 years to make good on a veto threat,
President Bush used his first to underscore his politically risky stand against federal funding for the embryonic stem cell research that most Americans support.
Some political strategists say Bush's high-profile stance on such an intensely emotional issue could hurt the party's congressional candidates in November in heartland places like Missouri.
"This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others," Bush said after rejecting calls that he change his policy. "It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."
The veto puts some Republicans in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between the wishes of their conservative backers who consider embryonic stem cells to be early human life and those in greater numbers who want to use the cells for research that could one day save lives.
"I think history will look very unkindly on this veto," said Rep. Chris Shays, a moderate Connecticut Republican who helped pass the legislation. "I believe the president is very sincere in vetoing this bill, but I think that he's been captured by his own ideology and taking his ideology to an extreme."
.......
so we will see more good US scienctist come to sg to stuyt stem cell.
Western sciencetist spends much of time to write paper
to get fund>Those working in Sg no need.
sg stem cell news -
At least USA still has some morality, unlike Sg which allows casinos...
-
Crap, morality can be compromised when making more money is cocern..Originally posted by pikamaster:At least USA still has some morality, unlike Sg which allows casinos... -
usa has plenty of casinos.....that aside, sg is losing the competitive edge it once had so it's not in a position to talk about morals where money is concerned. the bioscience sector is a huge gamble, many projects don't see commerical viability for a long time. it could end up like the semi-conductor industry hastily put together, it's bringing in lousy returns but has a huge employment base so you can't kill it.Originally posted by pikamaster:At least USA still has some morality, unlike Sg which allows casinos...
we don't have enough mavericks, even the half-baked ones kanna banned by the cannot take joke govt. lky was visiting dubai quite frequenly not to long ago, i guess after seeing the beautiful man made island real estate did sentosa cove came to be developed..... -
I just read the Tom Cruize was snub by Bush , to ban stem cell research.
Btw, Tom has a weird religion somewhat similar to Fulungong - scienctoiv or something like that. Hmmm -
ScientologyOriginally posted by MobyDog:I just read the Tom Cruize was snub by Bush , to ban stem cell research.
Btw, Tom has a weird religion somewhat similar to Fulungong - scienctoiv or something like that. Hmmm
http://www.scientology.org/ -
Originally posted by lionnoisy:
Their loss is our gain...
2.Sg already gained fr US no funding policy.
so we will see more good US scienctist come to sg to stuyt stem cell.
Western sciencetist spends much of time to write paper
to get fund>Those working in Sg no need.
sg stem cell news[b][/b]
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2631
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0003140D-34B1-12BC-ADB783414B7F014C
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v8/n4/full/nm0402-314b.html -
Crap morality, those lives lost will be made up by the lives saved.
-
Stem Cell Central,American researchers--fed up with politics getting in the way of science--are packing up and heading to Singapore, which is delighted to have them
By BRYAN WALSH/ SINGAPORE TIME MagazinePosted Sunday, Jul. 23, 2006
For a serial kidnapper, Philip Yeo looks harmless enough. But to hear some people tell it, he's a dangerous man. 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. Just last week President George W. Bush used the first veto of his presidency to block a congressional action that would have lifted his 2001 ban on federal funding for most stem-cell research, ensuring that cell lines will remain scarce and money short at research centers lacking the state funding or private wealth to thumb their nose at dollars from Washington.
While Bush's action infuriated U.S. scientists, political catfights aren't the only things that make stem-cell research a challenge. The science is complex, the cost is high, and the efforts are scattered all over the world. Enter Singapore, which has begun offering itself as a combination sanctuary and think tank for scientists in the field.
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.
A group of seven asymmetrical buildings with sci-fi names like Nanos and Proteos, all connected by transparent sky bridges, Biopolis is meant to be a self-enclosed science city, housing government research institutes, biotech start-ups and global drug companies. At the ground level, researchers from some 50 countries meet and mingle over spicy laksa noodles, Philly cheesesteaks and German beer, discussing projects in English, the most widely spoken language in the multiethnic city. Inside, the well-stocked labs positively gleam. Ng Huck Hui, a team leader at the Genome Institute of Singapore, points to an expensive array of semiconductors. "We bought that three years ago, so by our standards it's pretty old," he says. "Might be time to get a new one." Says Lane, the Edinburgh expat who moved to Singapore in 2004 to head the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology: "The funding here is extremely good. You're in scientific heaven."
And it's 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 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. As with most stem-cell work at Biopolis, the focus at ESI is on building a broad business. Rather than designing patient-specific stem cells, grown from the very people who would later use them, ESI wants to create an inventory of more generalized cells that could be matched to a population of patients--the stem-cell equivalent of a blood bank.
"I 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.
Given its 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 of young Singaporean scientists to continue the work. Until they come of age, Yeo will be just as happy to come shopping for talent in the U.S. And as long as the stem-cell debate stumbles on in the U.S., American scientists will be just as happy to go.
Yeo recruits scientists from all over the world to Singapore's labs
--Photo MUNSHI AHMED FOR TIME
2.
read here for the summary and full stories and other essay.
-
Poor Singaporeans, all lost their moral compass. (Sorry I'm usually objective in matters discussed here, but I can't afford to be objective in such a moral issue as this.) And anw, how can u confirm tt ALL the lvies lost will be made up by the lives saved?Originally posted by Herzog_Zwei:Crap morality, those lives lost will be made up by the lives saved.
the (usually objective) pikamaster -
and its not even lives lost for crying out!Originally posted by Herzog_Zwei:Crap morality, those lives lost will be made up by the lives saved.
-
Singapore Acts as Haven for Stem Cell Research---By WAYNE ARNOLD
Published: August 17, 2006,New york Times.
Many links in the original essay.quote just fir back up.
(side note the reporter has stayed in sg for over 10 years)INGAPORE, Aug. 16 — You can’t buy Wrigley’s Spearmint gum in Singapore. But human embryonic stem cells? That’s a different matter.
part 1 of 2
Skip to next paragraph
Munshi Ahmed for The New York Times
Running experiments at the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Singapore. Two American researchers will be joining the institute soon.
Last month a local company, ES Cell International, claimed to be the first company to commercially produce human embryonic stem cell lines in a way that makes them suitable for clinical trials. Researchers can buy vials of stem cells from ES Cell over the Internet for $6,000.
Singapore, notably conservative on most social issues — including a ban on most types of chewing gum — is emerging as a hotbed for stem cell research, thanks to liberal laws in that field and equally liberal government financing.
Lately the tiny island-stateÂ’s ambition of joining the ranks of Boston and the Bay Area as a biotech hub has been getting a hand from an unexpected quarter: the White House. Bush administration policies that restrict federal money for stem cell research have prompted an increasing number of top scientists to pack their bags and head for this equatorial city.
Two of AmericaÂ’s most prominent cancer researchers, Neal G. Copeland and Nancy A. Jenkins, are planning to arrive here next month to take posts at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. The husband-and-wife team, who worked for 20 years at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, said politics and budget cuts had left financing in the United States too hard to come by.
“We wanted to be in a place where they are excited by science and things are moving upward,” said Dr. Copeland, who said he and his wife had already rented a condominium near Singapore’s shopping district and had joined the local American Club.
Scientists say President BushÂ’s veto last month of legislation to raise limits on federal financing for stem cell research was the latest in a series of setbacks, which they say are stifling the research environment and eroding the edge in basic medical science that the United States has held since World War II.
Shrinking research grants, a greater corporate emphasis on quick profits and the political firestorm over stem cells have left many American scientists frustrated and discouraged. Waiting in the wings with encouragement and cash is authoritarian Singapore, which has begun to earn a reputation as a haven for biomedical freedom.
The motive is economic. Faced with declining returns in electronics, the industry that vaulted Singapore into the ranks of the worldÂ’s richest nations, Singapore in 2000 began an initiative in biotechnology.
“It was part of the overall strategy of diversifying the base of our economy and, more specifically, adding on a research-intensive sector,” said Beh Swan Gin, who heads the Biomedical Sciences Group at the Economic Development Board.
Biotech joins a widening portfolio of industries Singapore is promoting. The nation is rapidly becoming a major center for private banking, for example, and it plans to build two of the worldÂ’s most expensive casino resorts to rev up tourism.
Using the same combination of tax holidays and incentives that made it a base for the worldÂ’s biggest electronics makers, Singapore has already managed to lure big drug companies. Factories pumping out pharmaceuticals for the likes of Merck, Pfizer and Schering-Plough now generate roughly 18 billion Singapore dollars ($11.4 billion) in annual revenue, and account for 5 percent of SingaporeÂ’s economy.
But Singapore wants companies to do more than make drugs here. To persuade them to conduct basic drug research and development as well, Singapore offered to pay up to 30 percent of their building costs. At least 30 companies have responded, including the Swiss drug giant Novartis, which has opened an institute here to develop drugs to fight tuberculosis and the dengue virus.
The centerpiece of SingaporeÂ’s biotechnology effort is the Biopolis, a seven-building biomedical hive that opened in late 2003 at a cost of 500 million Singapore dollars. It is outfitted with the latest high-tech equipment and features a bar, a day care center and an underground facility made to house a quarter-million laboratory mice.
Authorities are now building a stem cell bank at Biopolis, which will be able to count on some of the worldÂ’s most liberal laws on human embryonic cell usage.
Researchers hope that stem cells, the all-purpose building blocks that eventually turn into specific tissue like bone, muscle or nerves, can be harnessed and used to treat injuries or medical defects. Scientists have found that stem cells from embryos, unlike those in adults, have a greater flexibility and shelf life.
Bush administration opposition to stem cell research is based on the argument that it requires destroying embryos, each potentially representing a human life. Singapore allows stem cells to be taken from aborted fetuses or discarded embryos, and these embryos can be cloned and kept for up to 14 days to produce stem cells.
Running experiments at the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Singapore. Two American researchers will be joining the institute soon.
other photo:Amber Sawyer and Simon Cool of the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Singapore carry out stem cell research.
2.added 20.09.2006 wed
''But scientists say the addition of Dr. Copeland and Dr. Jenkins is a particular coup for Singapore — and an equally severe blow to the American research community. ''---read part 2 of quote.and 20.09.2006 wed Strait Times page 3. -
''But scientists say the addition of Dr. Copeland and Dr. Jenkins is a particular coup for Singapore — and an equally severe blow to the American research community.''---read below
(part 2 of 2) fr New york Times,pl read part one upstair
Singapore Acts as Haven for Stem Cell Research
Singapore officials say they have spent 1.5 billion Singapore dollars ($949 million) on biotechnology since 2000 and have budgeted another 1.44 billion Singapore dollars more over the next five years to finance development of new therapies and drugs.
That is not much compared with the approximately $27 billion the National Institutes of Health spends each year. But it is spread among a much smaller crowd. While scientists working for government research institutions here say they are warned not to talk about money, they readily acknowledge that SingaporeÂ’s salaries exceed those they can earn in the United States.
Lavish salaries and lofty titles have helped Singapore staff Biopolis with a roster of foreign luminaries. In 2001, the same year President Bush first imposed limits on financing of stem cell research, Singapore snagged the National Cancer Institute researcher Edison Liu Tak-Bun.
Dr. Liu said he had felt hemmed in by outdated academic structures and the biotechnology industryÂ’s preoccupation with financial survival.
“Singapore, however, welcomed new ideas and, because of its newness, provided degrees of organizational freedom necessary for me to succeed,” Dr. Liu said in an e-mail interview. He now works at Biopolis as head of the Genome Institute.
In 2003, Singapore lured Jackie Y. Ying from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she had become its youngest tenured professor ever, to head up its Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at Biopolis.
Earlier this year, Singapore scored another pair of Americans, the dean of the University of California, San Diego’s school of medicine, Edward W. Holmes, and his wife, Judith L. Swain. Dr. Swain was the school’s dean of translational medicine — the specialty of turning laboratory discoveries into practical drugs or therapies.
Although they will continue to work part of the time at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Holmes gave up his $450,000 deanÂ’s salary to become an executive deputy chairman at the Biomedical Research Council in Singapore. Dr. Swain will become executive director of a new organization, the Institute for Clinical Sciences.
Singapore has not limited its poaching to the United States. The same year Dr. Liu came to Singapore, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology imported the cancer researcher Yoshiaki Ito, who at the age of 63 was facing forced retirement from Kyoto University in Japan.
In 2004, the British cancer expert Sir David P. Lane, renowned for his discovery of the p53 tumor-suppressing gene and for his warnings that financing shortages would lead to a British brain drain, announced that he, too, would move to Biopolis. He is now the executive director of BiopolisÂ’s cell biology institute.
Probably the best known of Singapore’s imports was also one of its first — Alan Colman, who helped clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Unable to find backers willing to wait for his research on diabetes to pay off, he found a ready investor in the Economic Development Board in Singapore, which helped finance ES Cell with a group of Australian investors.
“In Singapore, they want a return on investment in the long term,” said Dr. Colman, now ES Cell’s chief executive. “That’s why I came: I could get hold of the money to do the work in a commercial environment that I couldn’t do in the U.S. or the U.K.”
Not all imports are scientific bigwigs, either. Amber Sawyer, 28, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology, came here this year with her husband, a sculptor. After meeting another institute import, an Australian stem-cell researcher, Simon Cool, last year, Dr. Sawyer said she was convinced Singapore was an ideal place to continue her research into using animal stem cells to grow bone.
ES Cell is hoping sales of its $6,000-a-vial cell lines can help pay for the companyÂ’s own research into finding stem cell treatments for diabetes and heart disease.
There is other evidence that SingaporeÂ’s efforts to bolster home-grown discoveries are yielding results. It was Singapore doctors, for example, who in 2001 first succeeded in curing a young boyÂ’s congenital anemia by using stem cells from the umbilical cord of an unrelated child.
Last year, local scientists here demonstrated in experiments with mice that stem cells could enter the brain via the bloodstream rather than be introduced directly through an invasive procedure.
Researchers at Biopolis also recently published new findings on just how stem cells gain their ability to transform into other types of cells, a discovery that could help steer stem cells into specific treatments.
Not every foreign move into Singapore works out. A joint venture at Biopolis between Johns Hopkins University and SingaporeÂ’s top scientific agency is closing down after the agency said Johns Hopkins was falling short of its recruitment goals.
But scientists say the addition of Dr. Copeland and Dr. Jenkins is a particular coup for Singapore — and an equally severe blow to the American research community.
“This is a sad, and I think for U.S. cancer patients, a tragic loss,” said Irving Weissman, director of the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine in California.
Dr. WeissmanÂ’s institute, along with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, had been ardently recruiting the two scientists, who were looking to find more secure financing for their work, which involves using mice to model human cancers.
“We have the biggest mouse colony in the United States,” said Dr. Copeland, “and it takes a lot of money to run that.”
The two were favoring Stanford, which stood to benefit from California Proposition 71 — the program meant to unleash $3 billion in state financing for stem cell research. But legal challenges have kept that money in limbo.
Faced with the prospect of scraping for dwindling grants in an uncertain legal environment, the two scientists decided to follow the advice of their former National Cancer Institute colleagues, Mr. Liu and Mr. Ito, and move to the Biopolis.
Now, Dr. Copeland said, his biggest concern is not money for his mice, but how to get his cellar full of vintage wines halfway around the world from Maryland to tropical Singapore.
2.read 20.09.2006 wed Strait Times page 3.