Biopolis: Asian Science in the Global Circuitry

Abstract

Biopolis is the major life sciences investment by Singapore to become a global player in a new knowledge economy, as well as a promissory construction, a future-oriented emergent form of life constituted by and constitutive of a series of ethical plateaus or terrains of decision-making under entrepreneurial, policy and scientific conditions of risk and inadequate knowledge. Singapore’s Biopolis partakes in general cultural shifts towards biological and ecological sensibilities as responses to fears of pandemics, climate change, destruction of biodiversity, and toxicities produced by industrial agriculture and manufacturing. The issue is learning about biorepair mechanisms and creating new ecologies of knowledge involving not only interest in infectious or chronic diseases but also stem and iPS cells, cancers and regenerative medicine. Using the Genome Institute of Singapore’s first ten years as a partial focus, this article suggests metrics of success (beyond merely money, jobs, patents) which lie in three arenas: infectious diseases, cross-national science diplomacy and regenerative medicine. In October 2010, Biopolis underwent a sudden shift towards ‘industrial alignment’, raising ethical questions about the nature of future biologies, bioeconomies and bioecologies that have been spliced into the messenger RNA of different social networks and technical platforms of emergent twenty-first century biological sensibilities.