Nurture local scientists for economic growth

One of the best things the present UP administration has done is to push through the long planned conversion of a portion of the UP campus into a technology park. Not only will UP earn some money to augment its extremely modest budget, it will provide opportunities for UP scientists that would hopefully encourage them to stay rather than go elsewhere to keep body and soul together.

It is difficult to understand why the campus leftists have been opposing this move for quite a long time now. They would rather that UP progressively lose its land to squatters and land grabbers. Luckily, even with the regular change in UP’s top leadership, the idea of putting up a technology park was never given up.

It is just as well too that Ayala has remained patient through the years. Now, Ayala Land has started to build a $120 million science park at the UP campus and the first buildings are due to be finished soon. Hopes are high that the UP-Ayala science park can be a catalyst for change, most specially in how we regard science’s role in our economic development.

In an era of instant everything, it seems we do not have the patience to invest in science. Yet, the lessons learned from Taiwan and from Vietnam, indicate that it’s important to incubate science and technology if we want to join the league of tiger economies around us. In Taiwan, it was only after they invested in developing their science and technology did their GDP start to skyrocket.

Some months ago, I wrote about how we lost a billion dollar investment of Intel to Vietnam and I wondered how we could have fumbled that one. The reason we lost that is now perfectly clear... the Intel executives said so themselves that the one big attraction of Vietnam is the importance its government is giving to the development of its manpower resources in science and technology.

Rey Vea, Mapua president and an outstanding UP alumnus, explained in his recent commencement address before graduating UP students why such an investment in S and T is important today. "We have upon us a knowledge-based economy and in such an economy nothing could be of greater strategic value to a country than the capability to generate new knowledge and technologies." Vea cites Lester Thurow of the Sloan School of Management who wrote in his book Building Wealth, that one of the more robust conclusions of economics is the high social returns of R & D spending.

Vea warned that "if we are not content to be the modern-day equivalents of ‘hewers of wood and bearers of water’, then not having R & D capability is not an option." He pointed out that as early as 1957, MIT economist Robert Solow calculated and showed that technology is responsible for about 80 percent of growth. "According to Fortune magazine, when the Pentium chip came out, ounce for ounce, it was about 40 times more expensive than gold. It was not due to the material because the chip was mainly just plain silicon, one of the most abundant materials on earth. Rather, it was the technology and the knowledge embodied in the chip that made it so valuable."

The thing is, Filipino scientists have always been world class but have also been frustrated at the lack of importance Philippine society gives to science. When was the last time a television network covered live the release of the results of the board examinations in engineering with the same excitement and hoopla that ABS-CBN gave the release of the last bar examinations? Society thinks lawyers are more important, so we get a surplus of lawyers!

Thus, it isn’t surprising that the discovery of several ground breaking technologies by Filipino scientists found their way abroad for commercialization. The local scene ignored their entrepreneurial promise. It is often recalled Erythromycin, a common antibiotic from Philippine soil bacteria and originating research from the country based on Filipino scientist Dr. Abelardo’s sample, was first commercialized abroad by New York Stock Exchange-listed Eli Lilly, a global research-based pharmaceutical company.

Filipino scientists Dr. Baldomero Olivera and Dr. Lourdes Cruz were the first to study prialt ziconotide, a pain killer 1,000 times more powerful than morphine and is non-addictive. But this was patented by Neurex of the US and developed by Elan Pharma PLC. It was a Filipino, Dr. Juan Salcedo that discovered that milled rice mixed with Vitamin B1 was a good cure for Beri-beri.

And who has not heard of Dado Banatao, the wealthiest Filipino in America today? When the world’s most powerful mainframe computer was the IBM 360, Banatao’s innovative new chip-set design produced 10 times more power at a thousandth of the cost.

Banatao’s other technological innovations include: developing the first single-chip; the 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator while working for Commodore International in ’76; the first single-chip MicroVAX while working for Digital Equipment; the first 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicon coupler data-link control and trans-receiver chip; getting 3Com into the Ethernet PC add-in card business while at Seeq Technology in early ’80s; the first system logic chip set for the PC-XT and the PC-AT while at Mostron in ’84 and Chips & Technologies in ’85; the first enhanced graphics adapter chip set while at Chips & Technologies in ’85; pioneering local bus concept for PC while at S3 in 1989, and the first Windows accelerator chip while at S3 in ’90.

All these came to mind as I was reading the graduation address of Mikaela Fudolig, that 16-year old UP summa cum laude Physics graduate before her fellow graduates of UP’s College of Science. She asked the question: how do we, as scientists, help in nation building?

"I have noticed, again, from the many talks that I have attended, that the common idea of "community service" is Sangguniang Kabataan. Red Cross. Gawad Kalinga. Opinion leaders view community service, which they correlate to nation building, as using physical energy to help the poor. You want to do community service? Solicit money from your congressman and donate a school building. You want to do community service? Help during calamities. You want to do community service? Build houses for the poor.

"Again, let me make this clear: These ways are indeed community service. But are these the only ways to do community service? Should community service simply be giving something for nothing? Should community service necessarily involve a lot of legwork? Should the effects of community service be immediate?"

She cited the work of another fellow UP scientist. "When our very own Alexander Edward Dy made it possible for amoebiasis to be tested based on salivary IgA instead of stool, was that community service? Current conventional wisdom would answer: NO... And how can Alexander Dy’s amoebiasis test serve the poor in the squatters’ area? His method will definitely not give jobs to them. It wouldn’t give them shelter. And it’s not FREE.

"Mr. Dy’s amoebiasis test would probably not be given for free. It would not give them shelter, and most probably, wouldn’t give jobs, at least not to the usual recipients of charity. But if amoebiasis can be diagnosed faster simply by getting the saliva of a patient, something which can be readily obtained, then more amoebiasis patients would be cured. More lives would be saved.

"The community service of scientists is often underestimated. Our discoveries are often tagged as having no practical applications, of no use in calamities, and of no immediate help to the poor... if Alexander Dy, now magna cum laude, insisted on tutoring every single kid in his barangay FOR FREE, then they would be considered by the majority as excellent servers of the community. But they would not have done what they have done. Where would we be now?"

Well, hopefully we all see our scientists in a whole new light. They are essential to our economic development. Nurture them... incubate their ideas... or else as Rey Vea puts it, be content to be the modern-day equivalents of "hewers of wood and bearers of water."

Graffiti

It’s hard to make a comeback when you haven’t been anywhere.

Boo Chanco‘s e-mail address is [email protected]