Towards a frontier-level scientific ecosystem in Singapore — Part I
What kind of scientists—and what kind of institutions—would such an ecosystem require?
James Ming Liang Ang7 October 202610 min read
I grew up in Singapore and stayed there for the first 25 years of my life. Yet for much of that time, I felt like a sojourner in a foreign land—never truly belonging. Like many people of my generation, I wanted to leave Singapore. I wanted to experience the United States or the United Kingdom and become part of the scientific world that I had previously encountered only through my laptop screen. Eventually, I did: I moved to London to begin my PhD at UCL. I would not say that the grass proved greener on the other side, but neither did I become disappointed with life abroad. Instead, I met many non-Singaporeans who remarked on how Singaporean I was in my accent, thinking and mannerisms—an observation I had rarely heard while living in Singapore. The irony was that, whenever I returned to Singapore for Chinese New Year, taxi drivers taking me home from the airport would ask where I was from instead of greeting me with the familiar, “How was your holiday, ah boy?”—perhaps assuming that I was American- or British-born Chinese. It made me wonder: what does it mean to be Singaporean?
At the same time, my then-girlfriend, an ardent patriot, reminded me of the many remarkable things about Singapore that we ought to celebrate. Gradually, I developed a genuine affection for my hometown and a stronger sense of my own Singaporean identity. That affection now makes me concerned about how Singapore fits into a rapidly changing world. I increasingly worry about the country’s future governance and about how jaded my generation has become. This essay on Singapore’s research ecosystem forms one small part of my broader reflections on the governance of Singapore, some of which I hope to explore in future essays.
What it means to be a scientist
Before asking how Singapore might build a frontier-level scientific ecosystem, we should ask a more basic question: what does it mean to be a scientist? At the heart of science lies a commitment to truth—not truth as a possession, but truth as something we are obliged to seek even when it is inconvenient, unfashionable, or at odds with our own expectations.
“Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core.”
Max Wertheimer, “On Truth,” Social Research, vol. 1, no. 2 (1934), pp. 135–146.
This commitment demands rigour and correctness, the qualities one encounters most immediately in scientific training. Yet rigour alone is not enough. Because every scientist works at the edge of limited knowledge, good science also requires humility: the willingness to admit error, revise one’s beliefs, and take seriously what does not fit. It requires curiosity too—the impulse to look beyond what is already legible or useful, and to follow a question before its value can be proven. These virtues are less readily measured than technical competence and, in my view, too rarely cultivated in our culture. Yet they are precisely the qualities from which extraordinary work often grows.
Virtues do not develop in a vacuum. Scientists need time, material security, capable colleagues, intellectual freedom, and institutions that reward honest inquiry rather than mere performance. One might think of this as a hierarchy of scientific needs: before researchers can take genuine intellectual risks, they must first have the stability and trust that make such risks possible. The purpose of a scientific ecosystem is therefore not simply to distribute grants or assemble equipment. It is to create the conditions in which scientists can pursue truth with rigour, humility, and curiosity. Building those conditions is necessarily a national enterprise.
There is a temptation to define science by a fixed methodology and the scientist as someone who faithfully executes it. Questions that once belonged largely to philosophy have become practical again with the prospect of AI systems that can formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and interpret results. If science were reducible to an algorithm, then a sufficiently capable system might perform it simply by following the right procedure.
I am sceptical of so reductive a view of science. The history of science suggests that its greatest advances have rarely come from the mechanical application of a single method. Paul Feyerabend infamously captured this idea in the provocative phrase “anything goes.” This should not be taken to mean that every approach is equally capable of producing good science. Rather, it resembles Anton Ego’s reflection on Chef Gusteau’s motto at the end of Ratatouille: not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. Likewise, not every approach will lead to great science, but great science may emerge from methods, people, and places we least expect. Science is therefore held together less by a fixed procedure than by a shared ethos: a disciplined desire to understand the world as it is. A scientific ecosystem should not organise itself around any single methodological model. Its deeper task is to sustain that ethos—and to form people and institutions capable of carrying it forward.
Why build at the frontier?
The end of the First World War shattered any remaining illusion that science stood apart from power. From chemical warfare and cryptography to radar, nuclear physics, semiconductors and spaceflight, scientific capability has repeatedly conferred strategic advantage over the past century. Modern science is also an expensive and institutional enterprise. Because it depends substantially on governments and industry, it cannot escape the political and economic realities of the world in which it operates.
Singapore’s success was built within an open, rules-based international order underwritten by American power and expanding global trade. Many of the assumptions supporting that order now appear less secure. Since at least 2025, the world has entered a period of profound transition. This may not be an orderly passage from a unipolar to a multipolar system. The more unsettling possibility is an interregnum in which the old hegemon is increasingly unwilling to lead, while no successor is able or willing to assume its responsibilities. The old rules are weakening before new ones have been written.
In such a world, the language of spheres of influence, strategic autonomy and balances of power has returned to political calculation. Regionalism is strengthening, supply chains are increasingly viewed through the lens of security, and economic policy is becoming inseparable from national strategy. At the same time, the United States’ fiscal trajectory has raised serious questions about the durability of arrangements once treated as fixed. Governments have begun diversifying their reserves at the margins, even as the dollar remains dominant. The foundations on which Singapore once relied can no longer be taken for granted. We can no longer reason ceteris paribus, as though the background conditions of our prosperity will remain fixed while we optimise within them.
This changes how a national enterprise such as science must be understood. The profit-and-loss statement remains indispensable to any organisation, but it cannot be the first principle of statecraft. Capabilities that appear inefficient in ordinary times—redundant supply chains, domestic expertise, strategic reserves and patient investment in foundational research—may prove invaluable during a crisis. Enterprises are therefore being reconsidered not merely as engines of private profit, but as components of national resilience.
Seen in this light, science should not be treated as a priority that can safely take a back seat. It belongs near the centre of Singapore’s conception of Total Defence. Economic defence is not simply the pursuit of greater wealth; it is the cultivation of sufficient knowledge, capability and institutional resilience to preserve our agency in an increasingly uncertain world. A frontier-level scientific ecosystem would allow Singapore not merely to purchase technologies developed elsewhere, but to understand, adapt and, where necessary, create them for ourselves.
The emergence of AI systems capable of participating in scientific research does not eliminate this need. It may intensify it. If advanced scientific agents become widely available, every country gains access to more powerful tools, and the baseline for scientific competence rises accordingly. This is a Red Queen dynamic: when everyone can run faster, one must run faster merely to remain in place. The demand generated by geopolitical rivalry, technological competition and national survival may grow more quickly than AI can satisfy it.
Human judgement—the ability to identify important questions, recognise anomalous results, coordinate institutions and translate discovery into national capability—may consequently become more valuable, not less. This could produce something resembling Baumol’s cost disease: as AI makes the more routine components of research cheaper and more abundant, the remaining human bottlenecks acquire greater relative value. Frontier science is therefore not a luxury above some fixed threshold of sufficiency. The threshold itself is moving.
“When an empire comes to an end, with it ends all the universal concepts which an imperial system establishes…”
Lee Kuan Yew, reunion dinner of the St Andrew’s Old Boys’ Association, 7 September 1968
Scientific achievement can also contribute to something less tangible but no less important: national identity. The discoveries of scientists become part of a country’s shared inheritance. Their lives become stories about what a people is capable of achieving. Such stories matter most in difficult times, when a nation must draw upon a sense of common purpose that cannot be manufactured at the moment it is needed.
This common purpose has become an increasingly scarce resource in Singapore. We began as a society divided by race, language and religion. Modernisation and the rise of English as a common language softened some of those divisions, but did not abolish them. They have increasingly been overlaid by divisions of class and socioeconomic opportunity, often obscured by the language of meritocracy. These differences are no longer merely abstract. They are becoming geographically visible as well: some Singaporeans move to neighbouring countries in search of a lower cost of living, while others leave for cities such as San Francisco or New York in pursuit of highly paid careers.
Mobility is not itself a betrayal of national identity; Singapore has always depended upon people moving through the world. The harder question is whether Singaporeans who follow increasingly different paths will continue to understand themselves as participants in a common national project. When a crisis comes, will we still feel sufficiently bound to one another to make sacrifices for people whose lives look very different from our own?
During our first six decades, Singapore concentrated on building a capable state. The work of the next six may be to deepen the nation: to create forms of belonging sturdy enough to survive prosperity, mobility and disagreement. Scientific enterprise can become part of that story. Laboratories, universities and technology companies can be places where Singaporeans work together on problems larger than themselves. Scientific accomplishments can give us shared figures, shared memories and shared reasons for confidence. They can help us imagine Singapore not merely as an efficient place in which to live, but as a people capable of contributing original knowledge to humanity.
Finally, Singapore must act as a responsible steward of its influence. Many Singaporeans encounter countries such as Kenya or Sri Lanka chiefly as case studies in school. Yet policymakers and citizens in those countries often study Singapore far more seriously. Our institutions are examined, our policies are imitated, and our successes are invoked as evidence of what a small postcolonial state might achieve.
Our attitude towards science therefore affects more than Singapore alone. If a good scientific ecosystem is fundamentally one that protects the ethos of science—the disciplined will to discover and tell the truth—then building such an ecosystem allows us to model that ethos for others. We should want to inhabit a region in which societies are committed to reality, evidence and honest inquiry, particularly in a world increasingly vulnerable to propaganda, tribalism and convenient falsehoods.
Perhaps this ethos is not only good for scientists. Perhaps it is one of the conditions of a healthy society. The fuller passage from Max Wertheimer quoted earlier expresses the stakes plainly:
“Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.”
Max Wertheimer, “On Truth,” Social Research, vol. 1, no. 2 (1934), pp. 135–146
A frontier-level scientific ecosystem would therefore give Singapore more than discoveries, companies or strategic technologies. It would strengthen our resilience, enlarge our common story and deepen our commitment to truth. These are not peripheral benefits of science. In the world now emerging, they may be among the foundations of national survival.
Parting words
This essay is already long enough, and in an age when attention is increasingly scarce, little would be gained by extending it further. In Part II, I will turn from ends to means: how Singapore might build a scientific ecosystem more closely aligned with the ethos of science—and, in doing so, produce better research and serve the nation more effectively.