Tigers in the Lab

By J. MADELEINE NASH/TAIPEI

Like so many talented young taiwanese, Yuan T. Lee came to the U.S. to study, and then to stay. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He climbed the academic ladder. Eventually, he won a Nobel Prize. Then earlier this year, at the peak of his career, the 57-year- old chemist made a sweeping U-turn and headed back home to run Taiwan's prestigious Academia Sinica, a burgeoning collection of 21 research institutes.

The departure of such a distinguished scientist signals a dramatic change: the brain drain that has enriched the West with tens of thousands of Asia's best and brightest minds has begun to flow in the opposite direction. The Yuan T. Lees of tomorrow still flock to elite North American and European universities for advanced degrees, but more and more they are seeking employment in Asia, where opportunities to pursue careers in research are expanding almost as fast as sales of designer clothes and cellular phones.

The U.S., which last year pulled the plug on one of its most prestigious science projects, the Superconducting Supercollider, often seems to forget the value of funding research. But Asia has not. Japan has been building up its research capabilities for years, and it is being joined by the so-called Tigers of Asia -- Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. They are collectively plowing billions of dollars earned selling cars and computer parts into their technical universities and research institutes. Their goal is an ambitious one: first to catch up in scientific fields pioneered by the West, then to dominate the industries of the future.

Asia's new willingness to invest in long-term research reflects not just its recent economic boom but also a radical shift in social outlook. "Thirty years ago, when the average person needed rice and bread, who could talk about science?" asks Weichen Tien, head of the Development Center for Biotechnology in Taipei. "Today science is viewed as a necessity."

The change is as remarkable as it is recent -- especially for those scientists making the trip back East. Just 10 years ago, returning to Asia would have entailed enormous personal sacrifice. But that was before the job market for scientists and engineers in the West turned sour and prospects in the East turned sweet. Singapore's six-year-old Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology finds it increasingly easy to attract promising young Ph.D.s with offers that start at $40,000 a year. Hong Kong's new University of Science and Technology, which awarded degrees to its first class of 576 undergraduates last month, can match the handsome faculty salaries offered by top U.S. universities, and has even started to lure some prominent non-Asians. To direct a new $4.5 million environmental-studies program, for instance, Hong Kong recruited Gary Heinke from the University of Toronto. "We're not shy," laughs Hong Kong university president Chia-Wei Woo, whose resume includes a stint as president of San Francisco State University. "When we see someone we want, we can be very sticky."

For Asian-born scientists, a sense of duty, the tug of shared culture, the need to care for aging parents and a thousand other imponderables influence the decision to return. The recent wave of corporate downsizing and research cutbacks in the U.S. has also tipped the scales. A generous retirement package helped persuade Lee to leave his comfortable sinecure in Berkeley and take on the challenge of leading Academia Sinica. "Taiwan needs me," says Lee, "while to the University of California, it doesn't make that much difference whether I'm there or not."

But what ultimately wins over most wavering recruits is the sight of gleaming laboratories stocked with state-of-the-art equipment. In Taiwan K.H. Chen and his colleagues are using high-powered lasers to study ozone- destroying gases and films of sparkling diamonds. In Hong Kong engineers are fabricating computer chips in clean rooms that rival the very best facilities at U.S. universities. In Pohang, South Korea, scientists will soon start probing the structure of materials with a $180 million tool known as a synchrotron light source -- one of only half a dozen such machines in the world.

Although they have taken shape in the shadow of Japan, the scientific showcases of the Pacific Rim look for inspiration to California's Silicon Valley, where academics and entrepreneurs race to take ideas out of the lab and into the marketplace. In Hong Kong researchers are already working on projects for clients ranging from a small machine-tool manufacturer in Nanjing, China, to big multinationals like U.S.-based Motorola. Taiwan's scientists have taken on everything from vaccines to satellite communications, and many harbor even grander dreams. "In a few years," confides an aspiring biotechnologist, "I hope to start my own company."

But there is a danger in too narrow a focus on products and patents, warns Y.H. Tan, director of Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. While these may pay off in the short term, they are unlikely to yield the dazzling technological leaps that come from tackling fundamental problems in science. Tan's solution: continue supporting basic research -- like mapping the genes of the fugu, the poisonous blowfish prized by sushi chefs -- while at the same time prospecting for new drugs in Southeast Asia's flora and fauna for the British giant Glaxo.

Competition for openings in Asia's top research centers is keen. The Ph.D. he received from Indiana University wasn't good enough, jokes Huan Chang, now at Taiwan's Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences. "I had to go to Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow to get myself coated in a layer of gold." There is a frontier spirit in these fast-growing intellectual boom-towns that attracts job seekers with a taste for adventure. Calcutta-born Uttam Surana, an ambitious young biologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, turned down an offer from Germany's venerable Max Planck Institute to go to Singapore. "When you work with big people, you get overshadowed by their thinking," says Surana. "Here you can think your own thoughts."

The scientists returning to Asia bring more than just a Westernized preference for cappuccino over tea. They also carry with them a penchant for challenging the status quo. Until recently, Asian funding agencies still doled out research money according to traditional egalitarian formulas, with little regard for quality. Now they are being pressured to establish peer-review panels staffed by scientific experts to gauge the merit of competing proposals. Automatic promotions, still typical at many academic institutions, are also coming under attack, and some brave souls have even mounted an assault on the Confucian ethos -- particularly its stultifying worship of professors and its reluctance to question authority. Wen Chang, a young researcher at Academia Sinica, politely but firmly objects to being addressed as Teacher Chang. "I tell students that there is no authority in science," she says. "Everything can be overthrown the very next day."

While the Tigers' forays into R. and D. have begun to produce some first- rate scientific papers, they have yet to generate the trailblazing innovations that have streamed out of American laboratories. But the energy and exuberance alone of the Asians make them worth watching. Not tomorrow, perhaps, but a few decades from now, the U.S. may rue the policy drift that is eroding its research infrastructure as slowly and as surely as water rusts the steel girders of a bridge. For if political leaders in such places as Taiwan and Hong Kong are sufficiently patient and nurture the seedling research efforts they have planted, the scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century -- and the market opportunities that follow -- may be born on the Pacific Rim.

With reporting by Robert Guest/Seoul