CAMBRIDGE — Sitting in a prime booth at Legal Sea Foods in Kendall Square, Michael Gilman can look across the street to the MIT lab where he worked as an undergrad in the early 1970s. A few tables over at Legal, he was once persuaded to switch employers by a Nobel laureate. Now, Gilman works a block to the north, overseeing several drug development programs at Biogen Idec, one of the nation’s biggest biotech companies. Last year, Biogen Idec acquired Gilman’s start-up company, Stromedix, which had its offices a 15-minute walk away.
Gilman’s 30-year career has played out almost entirely between the MIT campus and Cambridge Street, a testament to the thriving ecosystem of companies, research facilities, money, and talent that has made Kendall Square the undisputed center of the life sciences universe.
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I don't see what Scott Kirsner sees in Kendall Square. I see an area of dark foreboding streets with very little human traffic after 5 P.M. It is so deserted that I am truly surprised that crime is not higher than it is. Kendall Square developers and the City of Cambridge are letting happen there what has happened all over major US metropolitan areas; huge, faceless, architecturally dreary, concrete buildings thrown up with no thought to residential housing, parks, schools or cultural amenities. And then these businesses, having milked every dime they can from the tax payer, abandon all that dreary steel and concrete ten, twenty or thirty years later. Kendall Square is not about people. It is about clueless politicians, entrepreneurs, greed, money, milking every dime out of the tax payer and abandoning the property a few decades later.
You are just plain wrong.
Biotechnology has always been about meeting unmet medical need. You should talk to patients who are dying of cancer, MS, CF or any other awful disease, who have been saved or had their life prolonged and you will see that but for the biotechnology inventions and products, these people would not be alive. For culture and residential housing, go 2 miles down Broadway.
KSQ is about bringing together the most brilliant minds and creating an ecosystem of problem solvers and enablers so that great achievements in therapy and care can be attained.
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Why these brilliant minds have to live in subarbs wasting their precious time in commute. If KSQ provided nice housing the brilliant minds can live with their family near their Inner Sanctum and family would love to see the brilliant mind at work!!
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