On Saturday, there appeared an article (suscription required) by Liaw Wy-Cin in the Straits Times reassuring us that “Biomed is no bubble that has burst”. Recent news might have led us naive non-experts to think that it had burst, for

First, local stem cell research company ES Cell International decided in May this year that it would halt stem cell research and focus instead on the business of taking stem cells to the market, with a smaller team of staff.

Then, United States-based biotech firm ViaCell made its exit from Singapore after funding from the Economic Development Board was pulled in May due to certain milestones not being met.

And on Thursday, The Straits Times reported that eminent cancer researcher David Lane will return to Britain to take on new key positions there in January.

These events come on the back of a forecast in a World Bank report late last year that said Singapore’s biotech ambitions had only a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

That followed the shock announcement in the middle of last year of the pullout of top US medical institution Johns Hopkins’ research arm after an eight-year union with Singapore.

The list goes on.

But we shouldn’t panic, because “the reality is simply that there is a biotech shake-up elsewhere too, and critical research talent - always mobile - is not really being lost here.”

The first half of that reassurance already does not make sense. If biotech bubbles elsewhere are bursting too, that doesn’t mean that our bubble isn’t bursting. Just because worse things are happening to other people doesn’t mean the things happening to us are any less bad. The best I can say about the second half is that it is incoherent. It seems to make two points: the first being that research talent is always mobile, so it’s only to be expected that such talents leave Singapore. But just because it is normal for such things to happen doesn’t mean it’s not a bad thing. The sceond point is that critical research talent is not being lost here anyway. Alright, so why insert that desperate-sounding caveat that talent is always mobile, then? We’re not supposed to be losing anyone, are we, so how is that relevant?

Enough nit-picking, I hear you say. All right. Let’s carry on finding out why we shouldn’t worry.

We are told that there is still lots of funding for stem cell research in Singapore. Fair enough. That stem cell research in Singapore is “streamlined under the public sector, which has deeper pockets — and a hardier stomach — to fund such fledging experiments”. Wonderful, but except for ES Stem Cell International restructuring, the other items on the list of ‘bad news’ about biomedical research in Singapore all concern public sector research. So telling us about the public sector’s supposedly deep pockets and hardy stomach isn’t exactly a reasurrance.

But perhaps that was just a filler paragraph leading up to addressing the concerns raised by each of the specific blows to biotech in Singapore that have been dealt. Liaw addresses the World Bank’s concern that the scientific foreign talent in Singapore were “footloose” scientists who would happily leave at short notice. This is apparently what David and Birgitte Lane are doing; returning to Dundee for most of the year and spending only “at least three months a year” in Singapore. Oh, that’s not too bad, Liaw echose A*Star’s official line. For the main purpose of snagging David Lane is to use him to elevate Singapore’s international profile and spread the word about research in Singapore. So says A*Star chairman Lim Chuan Poh:

When people in the industry read his papers and want to know where his work is, it’s at the Experimental Therapeutics Centre in Singapore.

Really? Just the work he does three months a year, you mean?

Oh, of course having some association with Singapore is better than having none. But the point is that for all their efforts to wave it away as a minor inconvenience, their multi-million dollar “whale” snagged by Philip Yeo a few years ago has decided that most of his research efforts should be concentrated in Dundee, not Singapore. When the Lanes go to conferences, are they going to be associated primarily with Dundee, or with Singapore? It is a step down for Singapore stem cell research, whichever way you cut it.

Liaw reassures us with anecdotes of the good things that are being done for Singapore by the Lanes. Such as the A*Star PhD students who are being trained at Dundee. The ’strong collaboration and training links’ that are supposedly being built between A*Star and Dundee. We’ll believe the latter when they happen. As for the former, the fact that the PhD students are already at Dundee shows that these connections were made earlier, when the Lanes were in their full-fledged positions in Singapore. So it’s hard to see how their spending more time at Dundee would necessarily strengthen connections that were made even when they weren’t physically in Dundee.

But, all right, we get more stuff about the Lanes helping Singapore to establish connections with other people, the ‘a lot of things can be done through email’ spiel, the arse-licking ‘our young budding nation is extremely privileged to be linked to someone as great as the Lanes’ remarks, and so on. And a somewhat irrelevant reassurance that intellectual property rights and their associated royalties from work done in Singapore will belong to Singapore. Well duh. The point is that the Lanes will be doing less work and supervising less work in Singapore, so more of their efforts will go towards intellectual property and whatnot that will ‘belong’ to Dundee, not Singapore.

It might be exaggerating to say that the entire biomedical industry is a bubble that has burst, so the headline is uncontroversially true, but to so incompetently obscure the departure of the Lanes as a minor inconvenience with plenty of silver lining insults the intelligence of Straits Times readers.