The brain factory
Smarts have always defined Boston, much to the city's satisfaction. But today there's no monpoly on thinking big -- and there's risk in thinking there is.
Boston, unlike Chicago, is not a city of broad shoulders. To state the obvious, its claim to fame has been its intellectual capital, which has not always matched its towering intellectual pretentions. Still, it is a city of smarties. Take the brains away and we're talking Palookaville.
From the transcendentalists to genome detectives, Boston has luxuriated in its brains and overweaning pride. Rich in sarcasm, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. referred to the State House as ''the hub of the solar system." Over the years, the city extended this cultural solipsism to the entire universe.
George Lyman Kittredge, a 19th-century mandarin of the Harvard English Department, captured this spirit when queried why he never received his doctorate. As legend has it, he responded without a whiff of irony, ''Who would examine me?"
For much of the 20th century, there existed a cognitive dissonance between Boston's gray matter and its economic health. At its nadir during the '50s, when it received urban last rites, Boston was showered with research dollars by the federal government to maintain American intellectual muscle in the Cold War against the Soviets.
Yet its business culture remained sclerotic. Its avatar was the estate lawyer, a sober Episcopalian who viewed risk much as a vampire does garlic. Boston may be a cradle of venture capital in this country, but practitioners here were a lonely breed until the early '80s. Risk, which had defined early Boston through
the China trade, had been bled from its thinking. Conservation, not creation, of capital was the small Boston mantra.
Elizabeth Hardwick, the former wife of the poet Robert Lowell, one of Boston's Hall-of-Fame loonies, arrived here with him in the '50s and captured the city and its WASP elite at their nadir: ''Boston -- wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming -- has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade."
John P. Marquand made the same point, albeit more gently, in his 1938 Pulitzer Prize winner, ''The Late George Apley." Apley writes plaintively to a friend, ''Dear John: I wish there weren't quite so many new ideas. Where do they come from? . . . I try to think what is in back of them and speculation often disturbs my sleep."
Well before World War I, Boston was living on the fumes of the ''Athens of America" trope of the late 19th century. By 1880, two iconic Boston names and intellects, Henry Adams and Henry James, had hit the road. Adams divided his time between Washington and Paris, James between London and Paris. So much for Beacon Hill.
''The adventure went elsewhere," says Peter Drummey, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Boston's 19th-century intellectual firepower was measured across a broad spectrum of business, science, and the arts. Unlike today, educated men excelled in multiple worlds of learning. Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the Supreme Court jurist, was a physician and a poet. Shattuck and Channing were Boston names known for their connective tissue between medicine and art.
Nothing captured this love affair with big ideas better than the Saturday Club, founded in 1855 for men of distinction -- and leisure -- to discuss literature and philosophy. The early roster of luminaries was impressive: Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Charles Francis Adams, among others. They epitomized the golden age of the gifted amateur.
Like Brahmin carpets, the primacy of the humanities faded long ago, replaced by the sharp, deep scientific professionalism of today. Science, not the humanities, defines Boston's intellectual capital now: There were a mere 41 Harvard undergraduates majoring in the classics in the last academic year.
Today Boston leads the world in unfathomables like biomedical research and nanotechnology. Scientists such as MIT's genome savant Eric Lander emit more star power than Harvard's high priestess of poetry, Helen Vendler.
The city's teaching hospitals remain acmes of medical innovation, if not health care delivery, and its financial muscle in mutual funds and venture capital is steroidal. All of this treasure depends, of course, on the continued health of its crown jewel, higher education, measured in the nearly 60 institutions in the Greater Boston area, and copious amounts of federal research dollars.
John Kenneth Galbraith, as usual, put it best. According to James O. Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College, in his book, ''Idealism and Liberal Education," Galbraith said some years ago: ''Universities are becoming, at the end of the century, what banks were at the beginning: the suppliers of the nation's most needed source of capital."
Just ask Lita Nelson, who directs MIT's Technology Licensing Office, the juggernaut that transforms the ideas of MIT faculty and students into patents -- about one every working day of the year -- and a stream of new companies. There is nothing else like it in the country: Venture capitalists who take calls from no one take calls from her shop.
What makes Boston unique, Nelson explains, is the whole package it provides a fledgling outfit. There are other centers of innovation and entrepreneurship. But, she says, ''It's so much easier to do it here." Here are the venture capitalists to invest in small companies, the lawyers who know how to bring them to life, the real estate specialists to site them, the accountants to handle their particular needs.
Yet Boston lags behind northern California as America's premier venture capital petri dish, due in part to the remnants of the risk-averse ethos of its ancien regime.
''They never had that attitude out there," says Stephen Woodsum, a founding partner of Summit Partners, a big Boston venture capital outfit with a $2 billion equity fund and offices in Palo Alto. ''We started behind, and we're still behind."
For all of Boston's strengths, Nelson, like other smart cookies, operates on a variation of
Twenty years ago outfits such as Digital Equipment Corp. and Wang Laboratories made the Boston area home to a big chunk of the computer science industry. They're gone now. Does Boston's hegemony in biomedical technology await the same fate?
''We're still at the top of the heap in biomedical innovation," says Charles Welch, past president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. ''So it's more of an issue that the future is at risk there. But the present is at risk with health care delivery. We're already in crisis."
''There's great complacency in Boston about our capacity to continue to have this," adds Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation. ''There is no reason to think we'll necessarily prevail."
Nor does there exist anymore a Cambridge-Washington axis of any significance. Washington doesn't parse the verbiage emitted at Francis Street dinner parties the way it did when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were rife with Harvard players. The throw-weight of Arthur Schlesinger, Galbraith, and, on the Republican side, Henry Kissinger, has disappeared.
Still, it's tough to get alarmist. The Boston package remains awesome and arrogant. Harvard is about to make a huge development play across the Charles River in Allston with a major commitment to science. Boston's venture capital community ranks second only to California's, and its mutual fund industry remains tops in the world, despite some gamy trading. Sweeter yet, New Yorkers kill to have their kids educated here.
Boston, in short, looks awfully good right now in the brain game. But then as the late, great Satchel Paige opined: ''Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."
