With four young children, they wanted jobs heading their own laboratories in the same city - a chancy prospect in today's job market, even for experts from an elite university.

They found salvation half a world away in Singapore, where each now enjoys a competitive salary, a cutting-edge lab and an occasional view of balmy Sumatra across the Singapore Strait.

Kraut and Papan joined an intellectual reverse migration away from the United States - the world's biomedical superpower - to Asia's fast-rising life science tigers.

Despite Singapore's autocratic image, built on such laws as its ban on chewing gum and the 1994 caning of an American teenager for vandalism, Western scientists say they have found an open scientific environment flowing with funds.

``It's like a dream come true,'' Papan said from his home in a gated community.

The compound is 10 minutes from his new workplace, the futuristic complex of steel-and-glass research buildings named Biopolis.

The nation has invested billions of dollars in bioscience. It has recruited American Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner of San Diego's Salk Institute; Edison Liu, former division chief at the US National Cancer Institute; and Britain's Alan Colman, who cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996.

Singapore's rise coincides with a tumultuous period in US science, brought on by security-linked visa curbs on foreign scholars, federal limits on stem cell research and a bioscience funding squeeze.

``The US may not be able to lead all areas of biosciences any more,'' said Yongmin Kim, chair of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, which collaborates with Singaporean institutes. ``It may be Japan, Britain, China or even Singapore.''

Inside Papan and Kraut's Singapore home, the dining room wall is papered over with worksheets of Chinese characters. The children are learning Putonghua.

Papan, 39, a native of Germany, felt out of place in the US. But Singapore has calmed ethnic relations among the dominant Chinese, minority Malays and Indians, and Westerners since race riots of the 1960s, imposing controls on speech, assembly and the press in the process.

Papan and Kraut felt comfortable, at ease in a city largely free of homelessness, crime and corruption.

At Caltech, Papan studied biomedical imaging and his wife was a post-doctoral student in nerve-cell biology. They had two demanding careers but modest incomes. Their family had grown large. Leon, the eldest, now 8; 7 year-old twins Magdalena and Ellen; and Sonja, 5.

``Child-care costs were sapping a whole salary,'' Kraut, 41, a native of La Jolla, California, said.

Last year, the National Institutes of Health budget, the chief source of US biological research funds, flattened.

``Suddenly, everything collapsed. We didn't have a future unless some golden box opened up,'' Papan said.

Then Kraut heard from a colleague in Singapore.

``Do you know anybody who wants to work here?'' the Singaporean asked.

``Us,'' Kraut thought. The couple accepted posts as principal investigators, heading labs at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

With a full-time domestic helper, family pressure eased.

US research is dominated by relentless competition for funding, a rat race even at top US institutions.

Two years ago, Mark Seielstad was a frustrated genetic epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

``They gave you a little bit of space and said, `Go get your grants,''' he said.

The Genomic Institute of Singapore, headed by fellow American Edison Liu, wooed him with guaranteed research support.

``The environment was better here. So I severed the link with Harvard,'' Seielstad said.

Salaries in Singapore are comparable to the US', but living costs are lower and Western researchers with children often receive subsidies for elite private schools. Even with full-time domestic help, they save more money than would be possible back home.

Singaporean institutes are organised much like internal research units of the US National Institutes of Health. Executives allocate funds, but principle investigators, who head labs of five to 15 researchers, manage their own projects.

Papan studies metabolic byproducts as a way to diagnose disease.

Across the hall from his lab, he showed off a US$$600,000 (HK$4.68 million) confocal microscope, which uses lasers and fluorescent markers to detect proteins and metabolites. Papan can use it whenever he wants, a rare luxury for junior researchers in the US.

``The money is always an issue in research except here,'' he said. ``If you can justify it, you can buy it.''

Singapore has become more alluring in the wake of policy arguments inside the United States.

The Bush administration has angered parts of the scientific community with a federal ban on funding for some stem cell research, a field richly supported by Singapore, and sweeping new lab security rules and biodefence programmes.

Post-9/11 visa policies have sealed off American science to thousands of Asian experts and trainees. Singapore has welcomed them with open arms and wallets.

Philip Yeo, the head of Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research, said America's fixation on security had opened ``a small window'' of opportunity for Singapore.

Bioscience is Singapore's second attempt to become a technological power.

Determined to create an economic bulwark against foreign domination, the government first turned to computer component manufacturing in the 1980s.

``When Singapore said they would reinvent themselves around the electronics business, people laughed. Then they became a dominant player. Now they are doing it with biotech,'' said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.

Competition from low-wage nations, and the dotcom bust in 2000, depressed electronics prices and threw Singapore into recession. The government concluded that the nation's future depended on more advanced fields, such as bioscience.

The nation's strategy has been the same: central control, liberal funding for favoured industries and co-operation between businesses and laboratories. ``They are systematic and relentless,'' Saffo said.

Biopolis is designed to multiply the return on its investments by encouraging collaboration across genomics, nanotechnology and other fields.

Several embryonic stem cell lines were originally created in Singapore, still a major supplier to US scientists.

The Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, established last year, has filed for patents on dozens of inventions, including ultra-sensitive diagnostic tools for cancer and Sars, and breathable, transparent membranes to cover burns and lacerations.

``I sometimes characterise Singapore as a venture-capital company masquerading as a government,'' said Lee Huntsman, president emeritus of the University of Washington, who has established co-operative academic programmes in Singapore.

Axel Ullrich, director of the Department of Molecular Biology at Germany's Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and one of the world's most influential biologists, recently agreed to head Singapore's Onco Genome Laboratory.

He likened Biopolis to a small Silicon Valley for biology.

``Singaporeans are the Californians of Asia,'' Ullrich said.

Quality research, generous tax laws and a push to become a regional centre for ``healthcare tourism'' have made Singapore a haven for pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Novartis, the giant Swiss drug company, recently opened a research and development facility in Biopolis.

The companies added more than US$6 billion to Singapore's economy last year, topping every manufacturing sector except electronics.

Irving Weissman, who directs Stanford University's stem cell institute, compared Biopolis to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where disdain for artificial borders between academic disciplines fostered the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA.

Singapore plans to extend the idea by building adjacent housing, shopping, schools and entertainment centres.

``I wish we had Biopolis at Stanford,'' Weissman said.

But Singapore's tight control has also created its own problems. Risk, the active ingredient in the often-chaotic brilliance of US science, is abhorred.

``A well-trained army ... they don't challenge,'' said Wei Chia-lin, a native of Taiwan who worked for years at US biotech firms before joining the Genome Institute of Singapore.

Importing Western scientists is seen as part of the solution. The other is to send students abroad. Each year, Singapore sends 100 of its top high school pupils to Western universities.

Yeo's research agency produced a booklet to attract aggressive and independent students. It is crafted to resemble a scrapbook of e-mails, diary entries and quotations from ``Chairman Yeo'' collected by two fictitious scholarship students, Samantha and Tian.

``Encourage the kids to listen to their heartstrings ... to spurn the compulsion to go with the tide,'' Sam tells Tian.

But outsiders wonder how fast individual initiative can take root in a culture of self-control.

``I do see a conservative stance from scientists as a result of this top-down approach,'' Paul Yager, a University of Washington bioengineering professor, said. ``I don't see it as well-suited to a long-term, healthy scientific environment.''