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 I am quite often asked, in some form or another, “What can
[STATE][LOCAL] government do to spur on an innovation-based economy in
[SEATTLE][WASHINGTON]?”
Well, as I said on a panel at the Technology Alliance meeting in
Leavenworth on Tuesday, the single biggest correlate to the strength of
an innovative biotechnology industry in any geography is the quality of
the major research institutions. The two heavyweight biotech hubs are
Boston and the Bay Area. No surprise there:
- In Boston, there are Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston University,
and various smaller but world-renowned research institutes such as the
Whitehead and the Broad;
- Iin the Bay Area, there are Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF.
Seattle and San Diego probably represent the next tier, with UW, the
Hutch, ISB, and others in Seattle, and UCSD, Scripps, Salk, and others
in San Diego.
If the quality of the major research institutions is the critical
correlate, then anything that can be done to bolster the quality of
that research would represent at least one highly fruitful way in which
to improve Seattle’s competitiveness as a biotechnology center. One way
to bolster research is to create additional funds for researchers
already in place, and the state of Washington has already done that
with the creation of the Life Sciences Discovery Fund. However, an even
better use of these or any funds brought to bear in this effort should
be utilized instead to attract and endow chairs for “rock star”
researchers who have made their names elsewhere. Doing this is a
highly-focused, high-profile activity that will have the ripple effect
of bringing with them:
- Already established quivers filled with grant funding;
- High-profile
reputations, raising the profile and reputation of our research
institutions (with many additional ripple effects like future
recruitment of faculty and top students);
- Top-notch students and post-docs.
Done right, this focused approach will do far more, with its continued
“ripple-on-a-ripple” effect in the long term to solidify and bolster
the productivity and profile of our research institutions than almost
anything I have seen that is currently being done here or elsewhere.
One fantastic, if not polarizing, example of this involves Lee Hood’s
recruitment to the University of Washington. Without saying much about
the who’s and where’s of the people and money behind recruiting a
superstar of Lee’s stature from Caltech to start a new department of
Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington, nobody can
dispute the huge positive effect Lee’s presence has had on biotech in
Seattle, reaching well beyond the entrepreneurs and scientists who
trained under Lee at UW, the faculty that he played a part in
recruiting, and the companies that he and those students and faculty
have gone on to start.
If we the people of Washington want Seattle to be a sustainable and
robust world center of biotechnology, then we need to let our state and
local governments know that they should consider committing long-term
funding (endowment) of prestigious chairs and professorships at our
research institutions which those institutions can use to attract true
impact-making superstars of basic life science research. A handful or
two of such hires will go far further to cement and grow the
innovation-based biotechnology industry here for decades to come.
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