The Singapore connection

Whitehead and MIT faculty lend a hand to an astonishing initiative half a world away

Hwai-Loong Kong came to MIT’s Sloan School in 2001 with a mission: understanding how successful biomedical research organizations are built. The Singapore cancer physician chose Whitehead as his model for his master’s thesis.

Then he returned to his tiny Southeast Asian country to create world-class basic biomedical research institutions, serving as executive director of a new Biomedical Research Council that spearheaded the effort.

The island nation's Biopolis houses many biomedical research institutions that didn't exist a decade ago.

An island country just north of the equator, Singapore has a population of four million in an area that would fit within Boston’s Route 128 beltway. It has maintained impressive economic growth since the 1960s by concentrating government and society resources on targeted industries.

In the 1990s, Singapore added biomedicine to the list.

“Singapore placed a large bet on the very great potential importance and economic impact of biomedical research,” says Whitehead Member Susan Lindquist, an advisor to the country’s BioMedical Research Council during its startup years. “I think this is visionary, and has the potential to profoundly influence their future success.”

One cornerstone of the effort is the Biopolis, a new campus of government research institutes, medical schools and private research groups focused on basic biomedicine. The new facilities have attracted talent from around the world. Whitehead Member Robert Weinberg, who chairs the scientific advisory board of the Genome Institute of Singapore, remarks, “I’ve been astounded and gratified by how well they have recruited first-class researchers.”

Training globally

To create a new labor force to meet its biotech goals, Singapore also invested in biomedical education.

“You have to realize that this is a managed economy,” says Whitehead Member Paul Matsudaira, who has been advising Singapore on research programs in biomedicine since 1999. “In the U.S. we let a lot of people do terrific science, and then we have the confidence that it will all percolate up into useful technology, which it does. But Singapore feels it has to manage that process a little bit more efficiently because they are depending on biotechnology to support their economy. And because they want to manage their economy, they have to manage the manpower and research.”

Singapore increased opportunities for students by launching partnerships with elite educational institutions, such as MIT and Duke University. The Singapore-MIT Alliance, for example, gives students access to faculty members on both sides of the globe.

For instance, Huangming Xie, a Singapore-MIT Alliance graduate student, has two supervisors for his studies on how microRNAs regulate cell differentiation. One is Whitehead Member Harvey Lodish, in whose lab he’s working. The other, Bing Lim, is a Harvard Medical School professor who works at the Genome Institute of Singapore.

Xie is a member of the first group of doctoral students in a new program on computation and systems biology co-chaired by Matsudaira and Professor Hew Choy Leong. The group began its studies in Singapore in July 2005.

In addition to courses and research in Singapore, students benefited from videoconferenced classes taught jointly by MIT and Singapore faculty. Given the 12-hour time difference, timing was a big problem, with classes running from 8 to 10 a.m. and p.m. at the two locations, says Xie. “But the course was so interesting that we never fell asleep.”

He and his peers continued their coursework and research after arriving at MIT in January 2006.

“The faculty members here are quite friendly, there’s lots of guidance and the people in the lab are very helpful,” he says. “This program is trying to link the two parts of the world together.”

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Lessons from Whitehead

Here’s what Singapore's Hwai-Loong Kong says he learned about research management from the Whitehead model:

• Spare no effort to bring in the best people, the best brains. Research is more about people than about machines.


• Be focused, to achieve research impact.


• Be acutely attentive to the latest developments worldwide.


• Bring in young people. They liven up the place intellectually and socially, and they force the established members of the institution to stay sharp.


• Seek plurality of funding, public and private. Do not just open one door—have big doors, small doors and even windows.


• Stay close (physically and organizationally) to a top-rate university, which offers stability and many sharp young minds.


• A research institute must create its own unique social culture. Organizations that stay on top have good habits, good cultures and good traditions.