Biotech Land Rush

The region's leaders have caught biotech fever, and economist Joseph Cortright says that can be an unhealthy obsession. "Biotech is an idea virus that has swept governors and mayors across the country," says Cortright, co-author of an influential study about how cities have encouraged biotech development. "There is a herd instinct here. Ten years ago, everybody wanted to be Silicon Valley. Now the whole economic-development fraternity has moved lockstep to anoint biotech as the next big thing."

That's fine with Maura O'Neill, CEO of Explore Life, a Puget Sound consortium of political and business leaders. She hopes biotech fever brings new or expanded development to Seattle's waterfront Interbay neighborhood, to the neighborhood south of Lake Union, and to Renton, Bothell, and other locations. "We have built the most amazing medical school and bioscience infrastructure in the world," O'Neill says. "We need some new mechanisms to jump-start those scientists out of the labs." She quotes Lee Hartwell, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center: "Not enough science is being commercialized."

O'Neill wants biotech companies here to do what Boeing did with airplanes, what Microsoft did with software, and what Starbucks did with coffee. She wants to see 35,000 new biotech-related jobs in Washington in the next decade. That can happen, O'Neill says, only if we compete as a region, against other regions, with an alliance of business leaders, developers, and elected officials. First, though, she might need to referee a fight among the present and envisioned biotech centers in metropolitan Seattle.

Explore Life estimates there are hundreds of acres of land with the capacity for 30 million square feet of development throughout the regiona glut of options, really. Conceptual work is under way by the Port of Seattle for development at its Terminal 91 property in Interbay and by the city of Renton for the future of Boeing's sprawling but decreasingly active property at the south end of Lake Washington. The state's biggest biotech campus, Canyon Park in Bothell, has a great deal of development and redevelopment capacity already on line.

Maura ONeill, CEO of Explore Life, in the molecular-imaging laboratory at the University of Washington: "We have built the most amazing medical school and bioscience infrastructure in the world.">. (Annie Marie Musselman)

So there are fissures in Explore Life's alliance. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels is feuding with the Port over Terminal 91. Roger Belanich, the main developer of Canyon Park, doesn't hold out much hope for Renton's ambitions to create a biotech campus. Urbanists like former Seattle Mayor Paul Schell bemoan the suburban sprawl represented by Canyon Park. While O'Neill dreams of the region competing globally, biotech fever has incubated a good, old-fashioned real- estate brawl locally.

For O'Neill, the task at hand is both a heartfelt missionas a child, she watched her 5-year-old sister die from leukemiaand a methodical effort to replace the continuing loss of aerospace jobs at Boeing. "It's part man on the moon by the end of the decade, part jobs programs," she quips. "Washington used to be famous for lots of other things. Now we are famous for the highest unemployment in the country."

O'Neill's promotional work is backed by some heavy hitters. Former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice is chair of Explore Life's board, and the organization got startup funding from the city of Renton and the Port. O'Neill wants to help transform Washington's biotech industry from a small, fast-growing sector of the economy into a major engine of economic development.

Economist Cortright says his study of such efforts makes him doubtful. "The good news for Seattle is that it is a place that really does have a biotech industryone of the nine places in the country that does have a significant biotech presence," Cortright says. "That said, in none of the nine places is a biotech firm one of the largest 25 employers. Biotech has not been a base for employment in a region like aerospace has. Biotech is not a huge industry in terms of employment."

THERE ARE MORE than 3 million people in Washington's workforce, according to the state's Employment Security Department. The department's most recent numbers show that 7.6 percent of them are unemployed. In terms of employment, the leading industries in Washington are aerospace (including Boeing) with 62,300 workers and software publishing (including Microsoft) with 38,000. Biotech is not a big enough category for the state to track separately. The state does, however, have a category called physical, engineering, and life sciences, which has 528 employers and 16,500 workers. The Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association, a trade group, tracks its own employment category of biotech and medical-device companies and puts employment at 19,300 for 190 companies.

In either case, Cortright has a point. He warns against a facile comparison of biotech's potential to the growth of high-tech companies involved in the Internet, telecommunications, and software. Unlike the tremendous growth in the commercial and leisure use of computers, Cortright sees biotech as having a limited market. "It's unlikely under anybody's scenario that any of us will have a genetic-manipulation workstation on our desks in 20 years. Biotechnology is not a transformative force in the economy." Moreover, he says, biotech has not been able to cut costs in the dramatic fashion that the computer industry has. As a result, inflation of the nation's health care costs, affected dramatically by the price of pharmaceuticals, continues. Cortright thinks the sheer costliness of biotechnology will be a brake on its development. "Even if every drug turns out to be wildly successful, how much can we pay for pharmaceuticals?" he wonders.