SAN FRANCISCO (By Jon Talton, Arizona Republic) June 16, 2005 - This city of continual reinvention started working on a biotech hub more than a decade ago. It's finally starting to pay off.
San Francisco will be the headquarters of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the voter-approved effort that will invest $3 billion in stem-cell work.
Although that means only 50 employees initially, the institute will be handing out some of the most coveted grants in science.
Companies and research institutes will want to be nearby.
Equally important is the $1.5 billion expansion at the University of California at San Francisco. The new biosciences campus will eventually hold 10,000 students.
"San Francisco is a boom-and-bust economy, and it has been since the days of the gold rush," said Jim Chappell, president of the non-profit San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. "The city has reinvented itself from a mission town to the gold rush, to a port, to light manufacturing, to Fortune 500 headquarters, to a tourist economy, to the dot-coms. This is what comes next."
The geography of next is the rapidly changing warehouse and rail yard district that runs south of SBC Park, bordered by Mission Bay. From here you can look east across the water and see the cranes at the Port of Oakland, where San Francisco's shipping business migrated in the 1970s. On this side, the cranes are building what will become a self-contained urban center dedicated to biotech.
The idea of Mission Bay as a research center began 20 years ago. In the mid-1990s, Gap founder Donald Fisher, then-Mayor Willie Brown and investment banker Sanford Robertson persuaded the developer of the abandoned Southern Pacific rail yard to essentially donate the land to the university. But progress was slow. While the Bay Area has seen more than 70 biotech spinoffs from universities in recent years, none came to San Francisco.
After the dot-com bust, business and community leaders became more aggressive, led by Mayor Gavin Newsom. The city changed its payroll tax to give incentives to biotech outfits. And it made a major push to win the contest for the stem-cell institute.
Now, four biotech companies are moving to the city, and major developers, backed by big-name investors, are on the ground. The $100 million California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research opened in February. Plans call for the Mission Bay area to hold 6 million square feet of offices and labs, along with hospitals and student housing. Researchers, clinicians, students and industry will work side by side.
The biggest challenge is not finding capital but an affordable place to live.
And yet people still come here, and they tend to be better-educated and more entrepreneurial than average.
Biotech is an ideal fit for the city's population, Chappell said. "This is where educated, highly creative people want to live," he said. "We've got the research scientists, and the universities are producing more of them every year."
He added, "We're not competing for the bottom here but for the top."
This makes the Arizona Legislature's delay in funding a mere $7 million for a Phoenix medical school, a cornerstone of the state's emerging biomedical hub, seem not merely silly but suicidal.
Reach Talton at jon.talton@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8464.
