products.... and a leaderless FDA facing the greatest wave of new inventions in
history’ (Gollaher in CHI/PWC, 2002). The demand is for collaboration among
members of the biosciences innovation system to change laws that are perceived as
threatening the evolution of the industry in the post-genomic era.
Northern California is presented as the birthplace of biotechnology, which, along with
biomedical innovatons like cardiac stents, has a strong base of some 819
biomedical/biotechnological firms, employing 86,000 people (28,000 in
biotechnology), total R&D of $1.1 billion, NIH grants of $893 million and $4.1
billion in worldwide revenues, including $2.7 billion exports.. New infrastructure
projects include University of California San Francisco Medical School’s new $1.4
billion Mission Bay bioscience research campus, the new California Institutes for
Science and Innovation, and the California State University CSUPERB joint ventures
programme where universities and the private sector collaborate in bioscience
research, technology transfer, business and even residential development. Much
emphasis is placed on survey results showing that significant interaction occurs
among firms and the institutional research base in Northern California.
Thus, California’s academic research institutions are credited with playing a central
role in the growth of nearly one-third of biomedical/biotechnological firms, 42% of
firms had at least one research contract with a California research institution, 56% of
firms planned to broaden or maintain such agreements and up to 70% of firms having
patent license agreements planned to maintain or broaden them in future. The key
Northern California life sciences and clinical research institutes cited include Stanford
University (Biomedical Technology Information Programme), Lawrence Berkeley
and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and the University of California, San
Francisco Medical School, Berkeley (BioSTAR industry-academic collaboration),
Santa Cruz (with Berkeley, the California Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology
& Quantitative Biomedical Research, QB3) and Davis (Life Sciences Information
programme). More than 19,000 are employed in research in the region, and nowadays
two of the top ten NIH R&D grant recipients in the US are UCSF and Stanford. A
picture of this cluster that is developing the characteristics of a biosciences
megacentre is presented in www.biospace.co . But the judgement as to whether it yet
is, is occluded by the lobbying points that although some larger firms such as Abbot
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