George Church

displaced Britain, which displaced, you know, Spain and Portugal.

You know, it keeps moving.

Fresh blood is sometimes a good thing.

Again, I preface this by saying I'm not advocating this.

what else could go well you know there's just certain things that we the society is fairly good at doing collectively that we're not good at doing individually you know building roads schools and science are examples of that doesn't mean we couldn't learn how to do that you know you know you know some extent when you build a gated community a lot of that is done with private funding

It's possible we could figure out how to build roads and schools and just about everything.

It means we're going to run into some kind of hyper capitalism that might mean, you know, there's all kinds of pathologies that come along with that.

Well, first of all, thank you for being so generous in your evaluation, which maybe Take it with a grain of salt but

I think that what it is, being in the right place at the right time.

So, Boston is a unique culture.

It attracts some of the best and brightest students and postdocs automatically.

It is dense enough.

Sometimes people want to spread the wealth out evenly all over the universe or the planet.

And there's advantages to having it clustered, you know, so like if you have, you know, spouses can find other jobs in the same field.

So having a concentration of biotech and pharma and science.

MIT and Harvard and BU and so forth all in one pretty walkable distance, you know, not spread out all along the east or west coast, but actually in a walkable city is one thing.

That's the starting point.

And then

a lab that chooses from from an early stage to um you know to keep this dynamic between basic science and societal needs going um at all costs um causing great trauma when the lab starts but then getting a couple of wins and it starts building up a you know a it's a positive feedback loop where um

just like the building of Boston was a positive feedback loop, the more Harvard's and MIT's and high-tech startups than pharma.