First, as a public safety matter, I don’t think that the synthetic biology research belongs here, in an urban environment, prone to earthquakes, where the labs conducting it are not sufficiently paranoid for my tastes in how they handle the materials. (By “synthetic biology” I mean research that involves creating genetically altered bacteria, yeast, etc.) The simple facts are that we don’t really know how dangerous this kind of research is; there are good reasons to think it is more dangerous than is commonly reported; the “containment” practices for these GMOs is lax; the *monitoring* for escape of these creations is non-existent; in an earthquake or fire, there is little preparation or safeguards to prevent spills of materials they do try contain; the consequences of a sufficiently bad release are *irreversible* (short of, perhaps, nuking the Bay Area).

So that’s one thing. More mundanely but also important:

It’s a nice thing to bring all these brains together around, for example, LBL. Go, Chu, go! But that’s only half the story. The other half of the story is Berkeley adopting a de facto policy of staking most of its economic growth hopes on these firms. That’s a bad bet, for two reasons:

Reason 1: This kind of research does *not* recirculate its revenue in Berkeley very much at all. It does not contribute to a diversification of the City’s economy. It’s a kind of “bypass ramp” highway for big money. Sure, the money technically enters Berkeley in high volume at a fast rate. About as fast and at about the same volume, most of it quickly leaves again.

Reason 2: This de facto “most of our eggs in one basket” strategy is a bubble. Let’s assume this research is top tier – some of the very best that there is. Even so, the vast majority of the top tier research in these areas takes place *elsewhere*. The odds are that if big breakthroughs are going to happen, they’ll happen elsewhere and this research investment in Berkeley will dry up. One of the next best long-odds bet is that some breakthrough happens here, but then we’re done and this research investment in Berkeley dries up. Another of the best long-odds bets is that no serious breakthroughs happen anywhere or other external factors make breakthroughs irrelevant – the research investment in Berkeley dries up because there’s no money to fund it with.

In short, as a long-term (decades) economic strategy for Berkeley, the only possible way we can win is if the research (everywhere) never quite succeeds but in tiny increments that just barely prop up the global economy enough to justify continued research investment. To me, this seems like a very dubious bet.

So, the likely outcome in 5-10 years is a bunch of under-utilized, debt-burdened, facilities that are hard to convert to any other use that would keep them above water.

As a City, our primary focus really has to be on steps that build a highly diversified economy with high recirculation of dollars and a favorable balance of trade (e.g., importing less finished goods and exporting finished goods at a net profit to the City’s economy). Jacobian (Jane) Urban Economics, 101.

-t