Some interesting morning reading: Asia, with Singapore at the forefront, is making a serious effort to overtake the USA as the world leader in biotechnology. One academic scientist here at home says Singapore acts like a venture capital firm masquerading as a government. A venture capital state that implements autocratic social engineering policies to produce an ordered and peaceful society. The scientific go-getters in Singapore see the new post 9/11 security concerns in America, and the stifling of certain kinds of science by a conservative administration, as an opportunity to seize the advantage in biotech research.
More and more these days I wonder, intensely (pardon my adverb Strunk and White, it's appropriate here), about the future. I think we will see some unimaginable changes in the next fifty years. I hesitate to even think further ahead than that.
In other news, it seems that the recent fight in Washington over the intelligence overhaul legislation has revealed some serious fault lines in the republican party. The coming fight over social security reform will only exacerbate this. This is good. And not too surprising. The black and white picture (or red and blue as it were) that gripped our national imagination was mostly a caricature. We do need to be on guard to avoid homogeneity and divisiveness; together they are a scary combo, but we are still plenty diverse politically.
