Last few days in Singapore

Day 2-5

I have but one responsibility to do today and that is make it to dinner with future boss. So the rest of the time I spend sightseeing in Singapore. First things first, I go see the campus I might someday work at. The NTU campus is located on the farthwest side of the island of Singapore.

First I should explain a little about Singapore. It is whats called a city state, in that it is both a city and a country. It is an island about the size of Road Island. It lies just below Malaysia, almost touching the equator. It was once a part of Malaysia, but Malaysia disowned it around 1955. It shares a unique fact in History, in that it gained its independence through no choice of its own.

Some other cool facts are: to fly from Minnesota to Singapore, Its about 2o-24 hrs no matter whether you go east or west. Business has also come in droves to Singapore do to its very low tax structure. If I get a check, it is only taxed at 7% income tax.

It has gotten a bad name in the past because of its very strict laws. For example, eating on the subway or spitting on the sidewalk is a 1000 dollar fine. Caning is used for violent offenders (rape and assault) and anyone caught with drugs is put to death. But over my five day stay there, I only seen the police once, and that was while walking downtown. I was also drinking on the subway a few times, but I didnt get caught--I kinda forgot about the rules.

So back to the NTU campus. To me it looks more like a resort. There is many chinese and japanese gardens with fountains and tropical flowers and trees everywhere. All the sidewalks are covered so a person can get from campus to another without being drenched by the many tropical rainstorms. The building all look new and fairly staight of the art. They should be, as they are well well funded. The project I would be on just got a 10 million dollar grant for 5 yrs of research.

The university is well known for its engineering departments, of which I was interviewing for. I was in the Dept of Materials Science and Engineering, where they want someone with experience in biodegradable polymers and nanoparticles, something I learned about a lot more since I have been in Germany.

They want to design new types of stents for the heart. Stents are small metal coils inserted in the heart after a heart attack-- the metal coils keep the artery open so the blood can keep flowing. Whats great about this procedure is that it does not require open heart surgery. They can insert them through the artery in the leg, follow the artery up to the heart with a guidewire, and once in place the doctors expand the stent, which keeps the stent in the occluded (plugged up) section of the artery. This is the old technology. Metal stents have some problems in that they can cause blood clotting (or technically speaking, thrombosis) around the stent after a number of years, eventually stopping the blood flow and causing another heart attack.--so the design needs to be improved

Now, the people who want to hire me, want to make biodegradable stents. Instead of metal, we make it out of a plastic that gradually goes away after 8-12 months, kind of like the new stitches and sutures that never need to be taken out. After 8 months of having a stent in the artery, it has been found that the artery and the atherosis plaque taken on the shape of the stent, so the stent isnt needed anymore. The artery still stays wide open. Blood clotting is much less of a factor too, since there is no red blood cells sticking on the stent. The difficult part is finding plastic stents that dissolves gradually and does not come off in chunks. Chunks in the circulatory system is bad bad news for many organs, particularily in the brain.

And if it ever works, companies will be buying this patent left and right, I will be....a millionaire?.....no, probably not, but I should be able to afford a fine meal at Perkins or a Doener.

So this research would be a whole new field for me, changing gears from the field of drug delivery to biodegradable stents has some excitement in it.

The problem is living in Singapore and the lifestyle there. I think this will be the most difficult hurdle to get over. It seems the ethnic groups here really keep to themselves and mix as little as possible. I was looking at the ads and everyone wanted specific roomates--indians wanted indian roomates, chinese wanted only people from china, etc etc. I expect it isnt like this for everyone, but I read a lot of ads like it.

This living conditions, such as apartment space and living space is definitely smaller than what I would be used to. To live with same expectatons of living space in Singapore, this would cost about 1000-2000 per month, living with a roomate in a condo. But these prices seem a little steep.

The other option is living in the government housing, of which is the most prevalent there. Sharing a room in these crowded apartments is slightly less at about 500-900 dollars. The problems is living in the govt homes is the space. Each building is about 25 stories high, and buildings looked stacked from 20-40 apts per block. The people here are really packed in and its hard for me to imagine I would be comfortable in this environment day after day. I walked through a apartment courtyard of one of them and I seen a fleet of cockroaches scatter. Big ugly ones too-1-2 inches long. But this is the norm for tropics and I seen the cockroaches everywhere on Singapore. Like seeing ants in MN. They just seemed pretty thick around the housing, which unnerves me. I had to share close quarters with ants, spiders, and centipedes in past housing. But cockroaches I cant do. Call me weak.

There are a lot of advantages too, and I have to carefully weigh them. The food is great and fresh seafood is really cheap. 10 skewers of fresh grilled and marinated butterfly shrimp costed 2 dollars. I was eating these everywhere. My last day there one of the professors took me to restaurant located in the rainforest. One had to look out for green snakes in the trees. We ate at the edge of pond and turtles and carp swam right up to us, looking for fish food.

Scuba diving school is cheap and they have great dive sites close by in parts of Malaysia and many sunken ships to go look through. I have always wanted to learn how to sail, and I cant imagine a better location to learn than in the tropics. Since Singapore is a massive asian airport hub, flights to Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea, Thailand etc are cheap--round trip airfares are under 200 dollars and the dollar goes pretty far in these countries. It would be fascinating to visit all these lands, meet the people, eat the food, and of course, try all those homebrews. I think a good goal would be one new city every other month.

Ok, back in Germany now. I went from 30 C to 3 C (90 F to 35 F) in a space of 14 hrs of flight. Next stop: America on Sunday.