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Singapore Biopolis: Bare Life in the City-State

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East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal

Abstract

In late 2003, the Singaporean government launched Biopolis, a life sciences technopole that brings key Singaporean biomedical research institutes together with global and local biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and governance bodies. The government has allocated generous funding to a range of biomedical research at Biopolis and adjacent academic and clinical institutes. Its stated aim is to make Singapore the Biopolis of Asia, the premier life sciences hub in a region where several much more populous states, notably China, India, and South Korea, are rapidly scaling up public investment in regenerative medicine and genomics. This paper will tease out what is at stake in the creation of Biopolis for the Singaporean state and population and what it can tell us about South East Asian governmentality and its bioeconomic and biopolitical aspirations and anxieties. In particular the paper engages with the implicit utopian vision of a regenerative bioeconomy evident in the Biopolis project. Biopolis is a site which brings together local and imported scientific expertise with the biological productivity of the multi-ethnic Singaporean population, who are understood as surrogates for the SE Asian population more generally. The ultimate aim of Biopolis, I argue, is to recalibrate the relationships between the biological and political life of the Singaporean population, and secure the economic future of the city-state, through the advanced research and development of Asia-specific medical biotechnology.

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Notes

  1. Thrift (2006) suggests that the bioscience buildings recently built on university campuses all over the world are exemplary of the ways that innovation capital is using space to increase the valorization of scientific knowledge. These buildings are performative in that they are designed to foster interdisciplinary and a certain notion of interactive knowledge (Thrift 2006: 293).

  2. Halliday demonstrates the utopian qualities of botanical gardens, their early attempts to recreate an ideal Eden. See Halliday (2006) I am using the idea of Eden here in that register.

  3. China recently launched a 15-year Plan for medium and long-term science and technology development (2006–2020) with the goals of increasing R&D investment from the current 1.4% of economic output to 2.0% by 2010 and 2.5% by 2020.

  4. Between 2000 and 2007, it is estimated that the South Korean government has invested about 5.2 trillion South Korean Won ($4.4 billion) in the biomedical technology R&D field (Wong et al 2004).

  5. A comment made at the October 2005 Keystone symposium on stem cells, senescence, and cancer, Singapore.

  6. Aristotle, in a move typical of the gender politics that pervade The Politics, relegates the care for reproductive life to women and slaves and the space of the household, which is held to be quite separate from the proper social life of the Polis.

  7. In 2006 Singapore’s Gross National Income per capita was $US 29,320, while Australia’s was $US 35,990 (World Bank Atlas http://web.worldbank.org/ accessed 7-Mar-08).

  8. In a much more wide-ranging argument, Cooper (2008) argues that the whole project of Postfordist economies is the reanimation and revaluation of both organic and inorganic matter, by putting them into speculative play through the technical reconfigurations and market deregulation of the 1970s and 1980s.

  9. Interview, stem cell scientist, Biopolis, Singapore, 8th October 2007.

  10. Personal communication, Yao, Souchou.

  11. Cytoplasmic hybrids—the term for the cloning of human genetic material using animal eggs.

  12. The Singaporean stem cell bank will distribute the four good manufacturing practice (GMP) embryonic stem cell lines created by ES Cell International with Sydney IVF in 2006, clinically compliant lines that could be used in the future for human therapies. While the lines will be distributed worldwide to scientists without IP restrictions on preclinical research, their use for clinical applications will require license payments to ES Cell International. In other words, the Singaporean Stem Cell Bank will have a much closer relationship to business than the UK stem cell bank.

  13. A term used by the government to designate the presumed socially conservative general population, the beneficiaries of rather than participants in the ‘new economy’ (Wong and Bunnel 2006).

  14. Interview with STN life scientist.

  15. Interview with stem cell scientist.

  16. Interview with SCCS scientist.

  17. So for example, current evidence suggests that guidelines related to body mass index (BMI) and central obesity measurements should vary for different populations. South Asians appear to be more susceptible to developing metabolic disease at lower BMI ratios than north Europeans.

  18. Interview with SCCS scientist.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Catherine Waldby

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  1. Catherine Waldby
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Correspondence to Catherine Waldby.

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Waldby, C. Singapore Biopolis: Bare Life in the City-State. East Asian Science 3, 367–383 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12280-009-9089-2

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