Editorial: Don’t squander the chance to make L.A. a bioscience capital

The University of Southern California has a health sciences campus in northeast Los Angeles that’s home to the Keck School of Medicine and L.A. County-USC Medical Center but could be so much more: A bioscience hub, a medical tech incubator, an innovation center with enough lab space and support facilities to attract a critical mass of thinkers, inventors, technicians and entrepreneurs, along with the funding to turn ideas and experiments into new life-enhancing pharmaceuticals, medical devices and techniques — and jobs. As it stands now, some of the nation’s best talent in those fields is educated and trained here, but too often abandons L.A. for regions that offer more support and opportunities. Venture capital flees with them.

Adjacent to the health campus are two large, underused lots where Los Angeles County stores its public works equipment and parks its trucks. If only the county would trade those parcels to USC, university officials say, they could begin to build out a bioscience campus that encompasses that grander vision. Does the county want benefits for the community? Just name them, USC says, and let’s work it out.

So what’s the holdup?

Talk of a bioscience (or biomed, or biotech — the words are used interchangeably) cluster located in the area between Lincoln Heights and Boyle Heights has been going on (and off) for more than a decade. There have been L.A. County motions, studies and reports, but no deal.

In that same time, distant academic institutions have joined with municipalities to build medical tech hubs in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, on New York’s Roosevelt Island, and numerous other places besides. L.A. is at risk — and by no means for the first time — of talking big talk about developing its economic and intellectual infrastructure, yet losing out to other places because local politics and arcane decision-making protocols get in the way.

That’s a shame. Much of Los Angeles’ academic, public and business potential is embodied in the parties to this would-be deal, and in other institutions that have much to gain if it moves forward and much to lose if it fails. L.A.’s far-flung development patterns have allowed biomed innovators to emerge in various nodes around the county, from Valencia to Torrance to the San Gabriel Valley, but they are missing the benefits of a concentrated center. As it happens, USC’s medical campus could be that center.

But it’s also on a hill, giving the impression of separation from neighboring communities. And that is, in part, the rub. It is easy to see that hill as similar to the islands and bayfronts where other cities co-sponsor tech hubs that are cut off from the adjacent neighborhoods. Although the county and USC have a long relationship through the medical center that is publicly owned but staffed by the university, residents of Boyle Heights complain that they are too often made to feel unwelcome on the rest of the health sciences campus. They have the ear of county Supervisor Hilda Solis, who represents the area and does not want the hill to become a fortress or an ivory tower that shuns its neighbors. If the county is to participate in a project that will offer education, training and employment, Solis wants to ensure that a healthy share of those opportunities go to local residents, who for too long have suffered from income and health disparities.

She makes some legitimate points, but our worry is that the supervisor and the university are so far apart in their perception of what can and ought to happen at and adjacent to the medical campus that nothing will happen at all. That would send a signal to the scientists, physicians, students, entrepreneurs and investors who are looking for the right place to stake their future: Don’t look here. It would send a similar signal to other businesses and industries that Los Angeles is exactly the moribund, no-go zone they thought it was.

The good news is that Solis and USC have been meeting and talking informally. University officials say they are receptive to the supervisor’s concerns. The next step is for Solis and her colleagues on the board to finally open formal negotiations. That would be a signal of a different kind: that Los Angeles’ leaders recognize the region’s potential and are ready to work to realize it.

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