The Science Exodus

A side effect of the takeover of the U.S. government by the Christofascist Zombie Brigade is an exodus of top American scientists to other countries not in thrall to people who believe in killing massive numbers of people in war, but saving the stem cells.

Singapore is a top destination for American scientists:

Singapore's siren song is growing increasingly more irresistible for scientists, especially stem cell researchers who feel stifled by the U.S. government's restrictions on their field.

Two prominent California scientists are the latest to defect to the Asian city-state, announcing earlier this month that they, too, had fallen for its glittering acres of new laboratories outfitted with the latest gizmos.

They weren't the first defections, and Singapore officials at the Biotechnology Organization's annual convention in Chicago this week promise they won't be the last.

Other Asian countries, including Japan, South Korea and even China, are also here touting their burgeoning biotechnology spending to the 20,000 scientists and biotechnology executives attending the conference.

But what sets Singapore apart is the shear size of its effort to become the "Boston of the east" along with its promise to limit government meddling.

The 250-square-mile island nation known to some as the place that canes miscreants and has issues with chewing gum has already spent $4 billion on biotechnology and has committed another $8 billion through 2010 in a bid to give the United States a run for biomedical supremacy.

"I am absolutely amazed at what they have. It's just knock-dead gorgeous," said Dr. Judith Swain, a University of California, San Diego, heart researcher who will decamp to Singapore in September to run the country's new Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences at a state-funded research wonderland called Biopolis.

Does anyone believe that these Asian countries are stupid? Unfettered by the lunatics of the Christian right, these countries are able to invest in the scientific community ini a way the U.S. government, with its Jeebofascist leanings and its feverish plans to bring about Armaggedon, refuses to do.

I'm sure that there are many Americans who believe the book of Revelation to be real, and who believe that George W. Bush is God's Own Anointed Architect of the Rapture. But I can't imagine that this is where most Americans want to go. Most Americans believe that their children will live in a world much like the current one, but if the current thrall to religious extremists among the political elites is allowed to continue, the U.S. will be in for a future as medieval as the present we love to deride in Islamic countries -- while the rest of the developed world leaves us in the dust, still waiting for a Rapture that never comes.