But jobs for Singaporeans remains the overriding priority. Andre Wan, deputy executive director of A*STAR’s Biomedical Research Council, says that for a start, the body is under the ministry of trade, not health or science, which is often the case in other countries.

Wan says there wasn’t a private pharmaceutical lab on the island in 2000, and today there are 20. “We now have infrastructure, we now have people, and we now have the intellectual community to collaborate with, and many are here because of Biopolis.” He cites soaring output growth in the biomedical sector and, indeed, there was a spike in 2006 of 30.2 percent, to S$23 billion ($16.91 billion).

But not everyone is comfortable with A*STAR’s self-assessment. More than 90 percent of that growth is derived from a spectacular rise in pill- and capsule-making that began years before the biomedical initiative. “What is Philip Yeo’s definition of success,” Lee Wei Ling asked in Singapore’s Today newspaper, “and can he show at least some glimpse of it?”

Yeo had been the Economic Development Board’s longtime chairman before taking that position with A*STAR (and has since moved to a new agency promoting small companies). Lee has repeatedly complained that the biomedical initiative should focus on issues closer to home—like Hepatitis B, of which 5 percent of ethnic Chinese are carriers.

Pressed on the output figures, Wan concedes that they don’t directly reflect activity arising from the initiative, but serve as “a proxy to indicate the level of R&D activity is rising.” And it seems a fair point, but notional explanations may not be good enough at the end of Phase 2, which is focused on delivering results in translational and clinical research, where the ministry of health is playing a more significant role.

But Wan obviously believes the promise is there. Graduating up from the chemical engineering of pill-making to biologics to vaccines produced in living cells has already moved Singapore several orders of complexity higher, he argues. And Singapore’s pharma output figures definitely are changing. “Within the space of 18 months, four biologics projects were announced,” he says. “These will generate something like 1,500 jobs. Now, you can say it’s not the direct result of the research work, but the fact that we have the institutes that provide the training and the people does have a very material effect on the ability of Singapore to continue to attract [investment].”

And the endorsements can’t hurt. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, for instance, has called neophyte Singapore a competitor to Boston. “For a country that entered the field only a few years ago, that’s a huge compliment,” Wan says.

But down in Baltimore, Singapore loses some of its sheen. Johns Hopkins University was invited in to set up a cancer clinic, start clinical research, and work with M.D./Ph.D. students to train a cadre of researchers. Describing it as a bad memory today, Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO Edward D. Miller remembers endless fights with bureaucrats over money. He also says the goals suddenly changed to teaching Ph.D.s.

In the end, the government terminated Hopkins’ contract “for failure to meet milestones.” Johns Hopkins Singapore focused on areas of special concern to Asia such as identifying biomarkers in esophageal cancer. Ian McNiece, an expert in bone marrow and growing stem cells, headed a team of seven investigators. But A*STAR, according to its own press release, said Hopkins failed to import enough senior researchers.

Miller argues that it is young researchers who really produce. “I hate to say it, but very few people over 40 win the Nobel Prize.” Also irksome, he says, Singapore started negotiating with Duke University to partner with the National University of Singapore to set up a medical school without inviting Hopkins in to explore what else it could do.

(It’s been hit and miss with big foreign institutions. Despite woolly talk about the momentum that the just-opened Singapore campus of Australia’s University of New South Wales would bring to the Economic Development Board’s Global Schoolhouse initiative to attract foreign students to the country, the university wound up the venture with enrollment 50 percent short of projections.) 

Miller contends that the nonprofit concept does not exist in Singapore. Everything is business, he says, so the focus is on contracts instead of partnerships. “I don’t think they will build an academic milieu which great drug discoveries will come from—it will be more driven like drug companies and, as you and I know, drug companies don’t have anything in the pipeline.”