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The Rise of the Therapeutic City--HC2020 Perspective
Therapeutic City
The seed for this forecast perspective was planted the day my daughter Stella was born in February 2008. After the delivery, I put my wife and baby to bed for a much-needed rest and wandered down to the cafeteria at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Over a revolting cheeseburger and some stale coffee, I sat fascinated listening to the conversation at the table I shared - a deeply experienced master cardiac surgeon in a post-op debriefing with a team of doctors visiting from, judging by their accents, Eastern Europe. Having spent so much of my adult life thinking about how innovation and learning happens in technology clusters, I was intrigued by the intense face-to-face exchange of medical and scientific knowledge I was witnessing. Knowing that like our own obstetrician, these people were all practitioners as well as researchers and educators, I became fascinated by the dynamics of life in a major urban research hospital. The "therapeutic cities" idea was born the same day as my daughter.
This framework has brought some new resources to my attention, that are worth sharing:
- Andy Richards, a self-described "biotech addict" and serial entrepreneur in the life sciences cluster around Cambridge University in England, gave a great talk at the Cambridge Phenomenon conference last fall (at which I also spoke on the future of research parks). It offers a great view of the intersections between the information technology sector and life sciences sector.
- I've had a rich email dialogue with William Hoffman, founder of the Minnesota Biomedical and Bioscience Network who has collected some excellent data on biomedical clusters and co-authored a book on stem cell research. One media report of his work writes, quite succinctly, "Clustering is becoming more prevalent in the biosciences, despite concerns over the sustainability and economic effectiveness of science parks and hubs."
- More generally, Harvard economics professor Ed Glaeser's new book "Triumph of the City" is worth a read if you want to understand whycities are so important to innovation, and the ways that bringing people together accelerates the development of new ideas and technologies.
The Rise of the Therapeutic City perspective report can be found here.