Riding the life-science tiger
JUST WHAT the state needs: another business committee. Well, yes, actually -- if the new Massachusetts Life Science Collaborative can rationalize the state's current hodge podge of overlapping and competing efforts to boost this promising industry. Jobs for at least 600,000 Massachusetts residents and 10 percent of the state's gross domestic product depend on it.
Last week the nascent organization of business, government, university, and hospital executives had its first official meeting, but its seeds were planted three years ago, when the presidents of Harvard and MIT hosted a summit to galvanize the public and private sectors around the most potent economic engine to visit Massachusetts since the minicomputer. Unfortunately, the 2003 initiative splintered into dozens of individual constituencies. Everyone wants to harness biotech's billions. Obviously, all that activity would benefit from a central clearinghouse.
Massachusetts already has some of the world's best research institutions working on the human genome and its many applications. The question is whether the state is doing enough to harvest the fruits of that research. This means not only private labs and pharmaceutical companies, but opportunities for so-called "downstream" industries: commercial manufacturing of drugs, medical devices, and diagnostic tests. These jobs may never replace shoes or textiles as livelihoods for unskilled labor in Massachusetts, but they provide real opportunity for workers without advanced degrees.
The barriers are the familiar ones: the high cost of housing and energy, lack of industrial space, and a Byzantine permitting process. A memo to policymakers more than a year ago from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, a state agency, outlined additional challenges: a lagging public education system, especially in math and science, and a disorganized workforce development strategy. Transportation is another crisis area that threatens to strangle growth.
The real estate firm NAI Hunneman Commercial forecasts that the life sciences industry will occupy an additional million square feet of office and lab space in the near future, but most of the planned expansion remains clustered in Cambridge and the Longwood Medical Area. Someone needs to steer the runaway development to new locations, but in a rational way.
It isn't in the state's DNA, so to speak, to nurture co operation. But fierce competition from other states has produced what Paul Grogan of the Boston Foundation, a collaborative member, calls "a useful level of anxiety" that could catalyze change.
The very essence of the life sciences is interdisciplinary, merging together science, engineering, and information technology. But breaking down barriers between the scientific disciplines is just the start. 