Lee Wei Ling - whose brother, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, is driving Singapore's economic overhaul by moving into new areas such as scientific research, education and casinos - said that research resources had been spread too widely.

"We need to choose the few research areas that we think we may have a chance with," said Lee, a pediatrician who heads the National Neuroscience Institute. "We cannot do everything. We have to be more focused, especially when you are a little red dot with a GDP [gross domestic product] our size."

Lee said she does not have influence over policy, but she has raised her concerns about biomedical policy with her father, Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of independent Singapore. He remains a key member of his son's Cabinet with the title of "minister mentor."

The 52-year-old Lee Wei Ling lives in her father's house, where she meets the rest of her high-powered family most Sundays for dinner.

She said the country would be foolish if it failed to invest in niche areas of research such as Asian diseases and if it continued to compete with the scientific heavyweights of the West. "Why should we want to compete with another 10, 20, 30 world-class centers chasing the same thing?" she said.

Is the government listening?

"All I can say is that maybe they are having a rethink," she said, in her sparse office at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, where a portrait of her mother and a childhood photo of her playing with her older brother Lee Hsien Loong hang above her desk.

A shift could have big implications for foreign researchers in Singapore, and for the pharmaceutical companies and drug discovery firms which are keen on the wealthy country's venture capital funds for their research projects.

Singapore's famous foreign scientists include cancer researchers David Lane and Edison Liu, as well as Alan Colman - a British scientist whose team cloned Dolly the sheep.

"How many of the foreign stars have made any major discoveries after coming to Singapore?" Lee asked rhetorically.

"Anyone who looks at Singapore's size will wonder, why are we trying venture capitalism?"

Lee is hardly alone in taking a skeptical view of Singapore's strategy. The World Bank late last year said Singapore had only a 50-50 chance of succeeding in its drive.

Meanwhile, change is afoot.

Philip Yeo, the chief architect of Singapore's biomedical drive, is leaving the Agency for Science, Technology and Research after a five-year run to take up a job as an economic adviser to the prime minister in April.

Lee, who said she has been asked about her influence on Yeo's move, said she had nothing to do with it.

"I am amused and astonished by the misperception of how much power I wield," she said.

Lee suggested Singapore focus on specific research areas, perhaps in hepatitis B and auto-immune diseases common in Chinese, or in other diseases common in Malays or Indians.

REUTERS

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