Asia's Future

Philip Yeo, chairman of Singapore's powerful Economic Development Board, is by training a conservative and a traditionalist. For most of his 14 years at the government agency, Yeo and his team of meticulous technocrats have geared the island's investment policies and education system toward the manufacturing of products that long ago lost their glamour in the U.S., such as chemicals and computer memory chips.

But drop by Yeo's office atop the Raffles City complex in downtown Singapore today, and you'll find a man bubbling with the excitement of a schoolboy. His desk is strewn with well-thumbed copies of pop-science books like The Complete Idiot's Guide to Decoding Your Genes and Sex and the Origins of Death. He wants every school-age Singaporean to study the life sciences. The 54-year-old industrial engineer took time off himself last year to study biotechnology. "Every kid must understand genetics and DNA," says an ebullient Yeo.