From genes to therapeutics: educating the government and the public on biomedical sciences-a Singapore experience.

Singapore has a highly developed economy and has been recognized to have one of the best business environments in Asia. Her success is based largely on focused developments of key industries in traded services and manufacturing sectors. The challenge for Singapore is to utilize her small human resource to transform the present economy to a more knowledge-intensive economy. Singapore has recently embarked on the ambitious goal of developing Biomedical Sciences as an industry. Educating the government and the public on various aspects of this new industry was identified as one of the essential steps towards this goal. The challenge was to inspire non-biologists to embrace the life sciences. This review describes how a series of workshops were developed to address the needs and the challenges of educating the public and the government.