San Francisco Baywatch

摘要

Biotech has a brilliant and distinguished history in the Bay Area, but the fortunes of the whole region have turned sour in recent years with the dot-corn bust. The hope now is that, with some massive investment in 'interdisciplinary infrastructure' that will unite widely disparate fields, the glory years will return. The biotech industry was born in the Bay Area in 1972 with the invention of recombinant DNA by Stanley Cohen from Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of the University of California, San Francisco (see Nature 421, 456-457; 2003). The reverberations echoed around the world and helped to launch more than 600 companies and create thousands of biotech jobs in the Bay Area. For the biotech industry to progress it needs massive investment in interdisciplinary science to bring together biologists, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, computer scientists and engineers in the same setting. If successful, this could lead to advances in diagnostics, tissue engineering and nanotechnology, which in turn will spawn new companies and jobs for the recession-hit area.