S'pore's biotech hub ambitions on track

oxford mushroom SG

But most occupy relatively junior posts on the research teams. Officials concede it could take another decade before Singapore produces its own cadre of top scientists. Its authoritarian and risk-averse culture has been seen as a potential obstacle to creating a stimulating research environment.

But Mr Yeo dismissed such suggestions when he opened Biopolis in 2003. 'All that scientists think about are T-cells, B-cells,' he said. 'I don't think scientists go around protesting.'

(Straits Times July 3, 2005)

For someone who has not done a single day of bench work in a lab, Philip Yeo does sound rather flippant. Better not say anymore or he will sue again. Make your own conclusions...

bismarck SG

doesnt matter for me. i am not interested in biotech 1

robertteh SG

For a field as straightforward as micro-chip or computer software and hardware, or IT, Singapore has many opportunities in the past to get top people to do new technological start-ups the way Taiwan handled computerization programs back in the 197-s.

Singapore today has fallen way way behind Taiwan and Korea in technology push because it is too conceptual and has failed to chart a practical and workable economic master plan and implemented them to establish the lead.

Despite all the talks about being the best thinkers and planners we are losing our best scientists or researchers in such areas. I have recently come across one of the top student doing IT-related undergraduate works in a US university taken away by the US Aeronautics to work on their space-related computing works. Our robotic engineers cannot even get a job for 6 months after graduation as posted in FU two years back.

Do our ministers and top civil servants really understand what it takes to do technological start-ups or practical strategies the precedent condition to attract our top students and get them to lead our economic planning, actual researches in actual IT parks or micro-chip researches.

Given the fact that Singapore cannot even attract top students to come back and start on such technological economic manpower and practical start-up and our talents being continually taken away from us, has Mr. Yeo really succeeded in undertaking the right strategy Singapore needs to produce winning innovations and researches to lead in such areas.

Singapore has to throw the doors wider and allow others more qualifed and capable in overall technological economic planning beside Mr. Yeo to nurture our overall technology development and strategizing to maintain our leads.

If Mr. Yeo cannot succeed in maintaining the leads in IT, and micro-chip planning the way Intel or Taiwan or Samsung is doing, he is not achieving the right progress in Singapore in technological economic planning.

Within the cabinet, we need to find another visionary technological planner of the calibre of Dr. Goh Keng Swee to push the technogical development. A key minister has to keep pushing our technology economic planning to allow us to stay in the race.

In the past, we have employed too many legal and adminstrative ministers. These leaders are not well-versed in technological thinking and strategies. Mr. Sim Wong Hoo and the likes should be roped in as consultants to fill up the gap. Generalists are not up to the tasks.

We need Intel thinking in our cabinet. Every three years chips get a total upgrade and a new generation of chips will be produced to enable the country to stay ahead. From 1973, when the first chip was invented, today, the power of chip and system architecture has multiplied from 640 KB to beyond 40 GB. XT has been totally overwhelmed by the new 32-bit processors and the revolutions are still proceeding at a faster pace.

The reason why we are losing out in technological excellence as posted before is because we are full of generalists and lacking in visionary industrial planners who know the ropes in every technological areas.

Because of this lack of strategists who know the ropes, our own CSM and GLCs are still mediocre by Taiwan and Korea standard not to mention Japan or US.

Don't talk and talk just do and do. Get every top student we have to come back to serve in all technological economic start-ups from micro-chips to IT and Biotech and if we cannot do this, then go and set up more hawker stalls or wet markets.

What Singapore needs is top calibre ministers who can understand the ins-and-outs of technologies to plan and implement our technological economic master plan forward.

Don't let generalists keep talking about bond-breakers but get really good men to carry out the total economic technological applications based on practical technological excellence.

vito_corleone SG

fret not, we have countries like india and south korea to put these techno-wannabe's out of job Laughing my take on this: just like its past plans to become a tourism/financial/IT/business/arts hub this hub-thing is gonna end up in shambles

timothytsgsg SG

Robertteh has said what I wanted to say. The point is that PAP doesn't address the main issue- which is the most important matter of the whole problem altogether.

They pretend everything will be alright and everything will succeed as long as money is poured into something.

Well, like vito said- everything will turn out into shambles and who will be the losers? probably the taxpayers- after all EDB is a govt board.

robertteh SG

To: A Forumer (posted to Feedback Unit on 4.7.2005)

Well, your deliberations of the differences in attitudes among the children from China and Singapore is an interesting one.

The underlying problems are not very well understood but that is precisely where the problem is. We are losing out in competitive spirit from young. The whole society is guilty and the root of such an extensive problem lies in the way we are building our society - superficial and directed at attaining showy grades to make the ministry of education and teachers look good and the government triumphant with it politically motivated meritocracy.

In my personal experience, any student can excel and do well as long as he is trained and encouraged to go into in-depth enguiries and applications of what he is learning.

However in our system, the teachers and schools are using the students as objects for showing off their own results for the final examinations.

So you see Jack Neo's picture on "I not stupid" and you will know it means to be a kid in Singapore. There is little practical purpose in studying except to complete syllables and score in examinations.

I can say that unless we change the direction of education to one of mass participation in practical knowledge application from young, we will continue to produce superficially well qualified graduates in all fields who are only academically good in grades and not substance.

Our PH Ds, and MBAs do not accomplish renown researches or discoveries. They are generally employed to maintain publis administration policies without producing substantial results. We will need many many practical knowledge applicators of the like of Sim Wong Hoo rather than more academically qualified people who are highly educated but incapable of undertaking real-world knowledge applications and innovation in actual technological developments in various fields.

China parents who just came to Singapore will find naturally our education system too fickle and not preparing students in-depth in applications of knowledge. This shortcoming of our education system is not understood by any of our top leaders to date. They will have to suffer future setbacks when more highly educated graduates join our future highly educated unemployed.

If our education system is modified to give due weight to knowledge application, many fields of existing knowledge learned from secondary two or three can become interesting experiences in classes from which to develop many potential knowledge applicators to fill our entrepreneurs for business start-ups.

I have worked with highly qualified persons before but have found that many of them are not adept with what they have learned. They easily lost touch with what they have learned. They failed to develop their professions and do not have a tradition to become leading scientists or professionals after graduations. They have in short wasted their education to the extent of failing to sustain their particular knowledge to benefit society at large. Our many graduates in many fields have failed to develop or invent something.

The German engineers I understand are more engaged in their learned trades and skills and will continue with developing their skils or vocations long into working life after their graduation.

Many years ago, I wrote a letter to the Straits Times captioned deploring "Our lack of Technical Excellence" and the fact that many of our engineers preferred to jump into managerial or administrative bandwagon instead of developing their technical or technological excellence.

I have not seen another letter of such nature published in the ST after so many years. None of our top leaders are too concerned with nurturing practical knowledge application. As expected, there was no follow-up or response to my forum letter.

With leading the people into technological start-ups and application of knowledge in all fields and being overly obsessive with paper qualification, we are building a superficial society. Chinese has a saying "Du Sze Su, Du Su Sze, Sze Du Su" - Study dead stuff, Study till dead, Die to study"

The whole society looks up to paper qualifications. It is not that paper qualification is unimportant. It is the overzealous pursuit of paper qualification that is presently causing the slowdown or digression in practical knowledge applications at schools and up to higher institutes of learning.

We are so proud to announce that we are aiming to build a world-class university in NUS. Do our ministers understand that academics alone will be insufficient to get us anywhere near top 50s.

We must build a generation of knowledge applicators from schools not one that is too obsessed with passing examination alone.

I agree with your observation that parents in China were right in pointing out the shortcoming in our particular grade-driven system of education. It is this system that is causing us to lose out in knowledge application in the whole society as posted in my earlier post. It will take time for our leaders to understand that their over-obsessions with grades and passing of examinations and grouping of schools into elites and special is a major mistake.

I agree that for now our education system is really for showiness and scraping the surface.

All that the schools are doing is to make the students learn a bit of the same subject. I did not go to observe the schooling in China but I can see their wisdom in making the children go into depth in particular subject they like and take them properly at one go and then move on.

Our teachers do not wish to digress to explain something important or fundamental but always end the enquiring children with a stopper like "its just like that", "you just remember it this way".

Our whole government and its politically motivated education system has to change if we aspire to build our technological excellence.

LazerLordz SG

Anything tainted with the stain of political control designed to ensure the survival of one party over the nation will be doomed to failure.

k4korny SG

Mr robertteh.. seems like you have something against philip yeo eh? Laughing
anyway, this is my two-cents worth of comments on your earlier post.

============

Originally posted by robertteh:
Within the cabinet, we need to find another visionary technological planner of the calibre of Dr. Goh Keng Swee to push the technogical development. A key minister has to keep pushing our technology economic planning to allow us to stay in the race.

In the past, we have employed too many legal and adminstrative ministers. These leaders are not well-versed in technological thinking and strategies. Mr. Sim Wong Hoo and the likes should be roped in as consultants to fill up the gap. Generalists are not up to the tasks.

visionary leaders are rare finds. And in a small country like singapore we are already blessed to have 1 LKY at the right place at the right time. Just to illustrate your point... you talked about Sim Wong Hoo being visionary. How so? He got it right with the PC sound cards, but recently he has got it horribly wrong with the decision to fight head on with Apple iPod in the MP3 player market. As a result, Apple has > 50% of the market share while Creative has a pathetic < 5%. Creative will be likely to post its first annual lost since the past 5 years cos of this, in a time when other tech coys are beating forecast.

If Mr. Yeo cannot succeed in maintaining the leads in IT, and micro-chip planning the way Intel or Taiwan or Samsung is doing, he is not achieving the right progress in Singapore in technological economic planning.

IMO, this is a very harsh statement. No doubt we are not one of the leading semicondutor contries in the world, but credit has still to be given to some of the progress that edb has made in the semicon industry. For eg, the joint initiative between Philips, EDB and the semicon giant TSMC to form SSMC. They convinced big guns like Infineon, STM to invest in new multi-million dollar plants when these companies could have opted for lower cost destinations like india or M'sia.

If you want to point fingers at the state of our semicon industry, the fingers should be pointed at the cronies running Chartered Semicon. How did they managed to get their technology so outdated? Where are the "visionary leaders" there?

Don't talk and talk just do and do. Get every top student we have to come back to serve in all technological economic start-ups from micro-chips to IT and Biotech and if we cannot do this, then go and set up more hawker stalls or wet markets.

I never believe that top students make good entrepreneurs. If you bring it back to the context of this discussion, I never believe that Scholars will make ground breaking achievements. We dun have to look far for evidence. Just look at our defence science industry. Every year, our best scholars are being roped into the top few defence science organisation. Are we making ground breaking discoveries in that area? We are WAY WAY behind our US Counterparts. Most of the "so-called" achievements published in the papers are just modification of technical papers published by the Americans years back. Laughing

As for the entrepreneurship culture, it takes time to see results and fine-tune. Maybe a few generations before we can get it right. There was an initiative to in MOE to let the students "Learn more, by teaching less". The effort worth applauding, but for a moment, it created confusion among the teachers. Why? cos the current gen of teachers are brought up under the old school of thinking. To teach student to think out of the box, the teachers has first got to be taught to think out of the box.

Up til now, there is only 1 Bill Gates in the world. The rest are still just wannabes. It's easy to pinpoint things that are not going rite.. and so, this guy's head should be on the chopping block. But the reality is, Do we have a better person or plan to replace it? Changes takes time. Our current system is not Under-achieving. If we keep axing ppl for not being able to over-achieve , we may end up like an over zealous football club that keep changing managers in the middle of the season, before the team is allowed to settle.

robertteh SG

Singapore leaders have for the past forty years been promoting meritocracy, talents and their leadership. Based on such a policy, they have rewarded themselves the world-highest salaries in the name of meritocracy, retaining talents or avoiding corruptions.

Based on such principal political philosophy, people returned them to power elections after elections. Now during this leadeship transition, people want to know why the economy is not doing well and why they are being punished by double-charging on lands and all the corporatization (government relinguishing traditional services) with all the market-level fees when such problems can be avoided with more competitive and accountable governance.

Our leaders have not yet fulfilled their promises to create more jobs made in the last election. Have they the talents or leadership to entitle them to self-rewarding themselve the highest salaries from 1980s?

All we know is that after the recent years of economic downturns and recessions from the Asian Financial crisis, the economy has been heading south. Our leaders were heard constantly giving excuses to the effect that they cannot do anything due to external market conditions or our being short of entrepreneurs or talents.

If they should continue to make excuses not to perform as talents or the world's best then this is called flip-flop as regards their so-called meritocracy policy. If they are truly talents then they should take ownership of people's high-cost and other problems and work on them. There seems to be all the "U" turns against Sim Wong Hoo's NUTS advice and resorting to excuses and justifications to avoid responsibilities to lower costs and save jobs etc.

Under the new leadership of LHL, people were invited to give feedbacks and to participate in his idea of building an all-inclusive society.

Sad to say, despite all the feedbacks the past policies remain largely unchanged months after much talking about change under the new administration.

The high cost problem is affecting 90% of the population who are earning drastically reduced wages since the recessions and bursting of the government asset enhancement bubble.

Pro-foreign investment confidently based on attracting top talents and scholars remain ineffective in upgrading the economy to compete with Korea or Taiwan. The way to solve problems going forward is not to keep pushing problem to the alleged bond breakers or calling top scholars as mediocres in researches by the world standard. There has been neglect in promoting self-resilience or nurturing of local talents and practical entrepreneurs.

Looking back at our economic performance over the past 40 years or so, it is very clear that except for the first 20 years or so, when Singapore has achieved basic industrialization the economy has been losing direction after Dr. Goh Keng Swee has left the scene.

What went wrong? This is what we are now examining. We have been losing out in pursuing widespread knowledge application due to over-zealous promotion of academic talents that benefit only the few scholars themselves. The scholars have not helped us to achieve new technological start-ups, value-adding or attainments of all kinds of business hubs strategy from the 1980s.

Blames were frequently put on people, lack of resources, or external forces for such failures. Our leaders have proudly proclaimed as themselves as the best brains of the world but they were helplessly defending past policies which no longer work or work as well as before.

Bill Gate may be the only 1 in the world. Sim Wong Hoo may be difficult to find. But our leaders and top civil servants were considered the best talents deserving the highest pays, so what is wrong with citizens asking them to account for the lacklustre economic structuring or upgrading instead of helplessly reacting to criticism or defending past unworkable policies.

By the 1990s, Singapore essentially manages it economy using the same pro-foreign investment incentives (not to locals) to foreign companies irrespective of the fact our other countries are offering better and better similar incentives. They cannot see competitions like in the PSA and SIA cases until the situation is disasterously too late.

What seemed at first to be good economic strategy in the 1970s has by 1980s and 1990s, failed to work and backfired. Many MNCs and foreign companies are deserting Singapore by droves especially since the Asian Financial crisis.

Our leaders should live up to their self-proclaimed talents as the world's best and come up with really good economic master strategy to preempt and overcome foreseeable problems even taking China and India into the equation. They have lost valuable time so far due to egotism and clinging on past policies which failed to work now to meet the third-wave challenges.

Hence, today, Singapore is losing behind Korea, Taiwan not to mention Japan and a number of European countries like Finland, Switzerland and Denmark.

Despite being resourceless and small, many European countries who practise open and accountable governing processes have stayed consistently competitive and are churning out world products due to balanced successful economic strategies to maintain their high standards of living.

Singapore only rely on its leaders' constantly making conceptual claims about academic meritocracy or pro-foreign investment policies and seriously facilitating the whole business community to work out changes by supporting or nurturing practical knowledge application by the masses.

Education policy should not remain to pander to the top 2 % of the population since countries like Finland and Switzerland which did to resort to all such claims doing better with promoting broad-based knowledge applications by the general masses, the precondition for economic success as found in Finland, Switzerland and Denmark.

Sadly the leaders have failed and continued to fail to recognize their policy shortcomings.

Now that it has been admitted our talents or top scholars do not deliver as expected of them, let's be more humble like the Koreans or Taiwanese in building up our true new-age technological start-ups, new discoveries or inventions to take our economy higher. We should stop flogging the proverbial academic or talent dead horse.

As for the entrepreneurship culture, it takes time to see results and fine-tune. Maybe a few generations before we can get it right. There was an initiative to in MOE to let the students "Learn more, by teaching less". The effort worth applauding, but for a moment, it created confusion among the teachers. Why? cos the current gen of teachers are brought up under the old school of thinking. To teach student to think out of the box, the teachers has first got to be taught to think out of the box.

Up til now, there is only 1 Bill Gates in the world. The rest are still just wannabes. It's easy to pinpoint things that are not going rite.. and so, this guy's head should be on the chopping block. But the reality is, Do we have a better person or plan to replace it? Changes takes time. Our current system is not Under-achieving. If we keep axing ppl for not being able to over-achieve , we may end up like an over zealous football club that keep changing managers in the middle of the season, before the team is allowed to settle.
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If we cannot get the highly promoted scholars and top leaders to help us to attain the status of an excellent technologically advanced country then the old policy practised by the government and EDB in the name of meritocracy has to be revised.

Sad to say, I do not see any effective strategy since the last recessions being implemented to bring about new technological excellence and so far all the hubs and growth triangles have failed to meet the targets. Yet, we have the leaders sticking on to the old policy like sacred cow even after LHL has taken charge.

We do not need heros to rise above the masses and promote them to demi-gods. What we need is teamwork and taking of proactive steps to make all work towards becoming a truly technologically advanced nation. This is the new and worthwhile challenge for the new administration which should be chucking out old policies that don't work and chart out new strategies to create technological start-ups.

If clueless ministers cannot deliver the goals to make our economy as Korea and Taiwan have done, then we really need to find foreign ministers to deliver what Dr. Goh Keng Swee has done once.

Our top civil servant like Mr. Yeo of EDB should stay as humble servant and understand that a swallow does not make a summer. The same old policy that once worked does not necessarily work again in the future. He must not keep putting up with excuses about the male bond breakers and call them whiners or whimpers as they who are not solely at fault. Ladies do not necessarily make better scholars like what he has proclaimed. What we are seeing is a lot of hot air and the same characterically self-centred leadership style of the past.