The future is moving out of dusty library stacks and into pristine laboratories on both sides of the Charles River, making this area the national leader in biotechnology. The boom is driven by a new breed of intellectual wearing a white lab coat and using science to breach the barrier between academia and commerce. In all its manifestations, the biotechnology moment in Boston is a question of intellectual and cultural identity. Because biotechnology requires a familiarity with a variety of scientific disciplines -- physics, biology, mathematics, computer science -- it attracts people whose passions seem boundless and seem to run in several directions at once. The promise is what attracts the people, which is what attracts the money. Within a mile of MIT, you will find 13 of the 25 largest biotechnology companies in Massachusetts. "Ideas have a gravitational force. You get on the T, and maybe someone's talking about DNA, or biomedicine, or the life of the mind. The Boston intellectual is a young person now who's conversant with biology and with computer science. This is the scientific challenge of the next decade, and the intellectual community for that is here." |
