The tactical lesson hasn’t been lost on other states that are hustling to follow California’s lead. Illinois plans to fund $1 billion in research with a tax on cosmetic surgery; call it the Bo-tax. Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Florida are formulating their own plans. New York’s immediate neighbors have been particularly busy. Connecticut governor Jodi Rell wants her state to spend up to $20 million of its budget surplus on stem-cell research. A year ago, New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey had already funded $9.5 million of a new $50 million public-private stem-cell institute; new acting governor Richard Codey is talking about joining forces with Pennsylvania and Delaware to fund regional research. What about New York? With no ability to float a California-style ballot proposition, the state’s stem-cell future is now entirely up to Albany’s notoriously gridlocked State Legislature. In 2003, with Christopher Reeve at his side, Sheldon Silver, speaker of the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, announced a bill called the Reproductive Cloning Prohibition and Research Protection Act. The Assembly has passed it for two years running—but the bill, like the one California passed in 2002, doesn’t back up that support with funding. Not that it matters, really. Joe Bruno, the majority leader of the Republican-controlled State Senate, has left the bill in limbo—without his crucial support, it’s failed twice even to make it to conference—despite Bruno’s close friendship with Nancy Reagan.

And so far, George Pataki has treated the issue as if it were a contagious disease. For a governor eager to ingratiate himself with the president, it might as well be.

Until recent years, the great medical institutions of New York have tended to compete more than cooperate. The major medical centers—Columbia, NYU, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Mount Sinai, Weill-Cornell, Rockefeller, and Yeshiva’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine—are accustomed to acting independently, often fighting for the same scientists and federal grant money. At one time in the late nineties, for example, there were no fewer than five different proposals for major bioscience parks on the drawing board in New York, each one sponsored by a different institution and requiring substantial public support. “When the state is asked to support one of them on something like a biotech incubator, they’re concerned they’ll piss off everybody else,” says Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan local economic-policy think tank. “In other cities, there are just one or two standouts, like Stanford and Berkeley or Harvard and MIT. The real problem is, no other city has this many top-tier research institutions.”

Some New York institutions did band together to lobby Washington and Albany: A group called New Yorkers for the Advancement of Medical Research—made up of hospitals, medical schools, the New York Biotechnology Association, and disease-focused advocacy groups like Project ALS—started trying to educate Albany legislators about the ethics of therapeutic cloning and the potential of stem-cell research. One of that group’s members, the Academic Medicine Development Company, or AMDeC (a lobbying organization for 35 New York medical schools, academic health centers, and research institutions) had formed a few years earlier to fight for a greater share of NIH grant money.

The city has also become a popular destination for exiled NIH figures from the Clinton administration. In 2000, Memorial Sloan-Kettering hired former NIH chief Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate for his study of the genetic basis of cancer who started pushing hard for the city to support private biotechnology. A year later, Gerald Fischbach, who had worked under Varmus at NIH, joined Columbia and embarked on his own campaign to fight the NIH restrictions on stem-cell research. He also founded a stem-cell consortium and raised $25 million for stem-cell research.

The medical institutions also found a friend in City Hall. Though admittedly more consumed with other efforts—like pushing hard for the Olympics and a new football stadium—Mike Bloomberg and his economic development staff are friendly to biotechnology. In November, the mayor unveiled plans to develop a long-discussed project called the East River Science Park, near NYU Medical Center, which will provide bioscience entrepreneurs with 870,000 square feet of space for start-up biotech businesses.

Then California lapped them all. Even before Election Day, the heads of New York’s medical institutions started wondering how big the brain drain would be if Prop 71 passed. As if to confirm their worst fears, Irv Weissman, director of Stanford University School of Medicine’s stem-cell institute, boasted in the press about how if the measure won, his first call would be to Harvard and his second to his friend Harold Varmus.

How would the city suffer if stem-cell research doesn’t happen here? It starts with jobs, and it ends, rather ominously, with the possible decline in the quality of our health care.

Let’s start with jobs. By all rights, we should have built a major commercial biotechnology industry here long ago. We have more than enough major medical centers, half the country’s pharmaceutical companies nearby, and an abundance of Wall Street venture capitalists ready to invest in the next Genentech. But practically every time a local doctor dreams up a new commercial drug, the company he partners with has left town. Over the years, the city has lost out on such success stories as Amgen, Pharmacopeia, and Memory Pharmaceuticals, a jewel of a company sprung from the lab of Columbia Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, only to be lured by economic incentives to New Jersey.

The price of not doing business surely runs in the billions, and with Prop 71, we stand to lose more. “If you look at Massachusetts or California, or even at emerging centers like Maryland and Virginia, the multiplier effect of these high-tech scientific jobs is tremendous,” says Kathy Wylde of the Partnership for New York City, the local chamber of commerce. “Silicon Alley is a blip on the screen compared to the potential economic benefits of the life-sciences sector.”

Part of the New York biotech problem is simply real estate. Biotech businesses need a certain kind of space to build and run laboratories, and the city simply hasn’t had it. Add to that the city’s high rents and there’s been little reason to start a biotech outfit here. Ron Cohen, a researcher and an entrepreneur, has actually started two different biotech companies in New York and moved both out of town. His current company, Acorda Therapeutics, which develops drugs to treat nervous-system disorders, opened an office in 1995 in what once had been a walk-in closet. After its first $20 million round of venture-capital financing in 1998, Cohen moved to Westchester. “There was only one viable alternative for the space we needed at the time,” he says—Columbia’s new business-incubator space, the Audubon Business and Technology Center in Washington Heights. “There was nothing else. I was thinking ahead, and if we needed 20,000 feet of space, it wasn’t going to be here.”

The city’s announced bioscience center might help alleviate the space problem, but the rents are still high, and local and state governments haven’t offered subsidies or other incentives the way biotech growth areas like Maryland have. In early 2001, Wylde’s group issued a study suggesting that if the city could invest $100 million in biotech, the private sector would come through with an additional $400 million, making New York the third-biggest biotech market in the nation. The city didn’t oblige. “I’m not sure New York’s business and political leaders feel hungry enough to pursue growth strategies,” says Jonathan Bowles.

New York also has a stigma to live down. The city just isn’t perceived as a biotech town. “Our problem is largely a marketing problem,” says Andrew Alper, head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. He often tells the story of a newly elected Mike Bloomberg cold-calling Dan Vasella, the CEO of Novartis, after the company announced it was consolidating in Cambridge. They visited Vasella’s pied-à-terre in midtown and made their pitch. Alper recalls Vasella’s saying, “You know what? It just never occurred to me. I was trained in New York, I lived in New York, what you’re saying is absolutely right. You just were not on my radar screen—you weren’t even on my short list of cities to think about for expansion.” Novartis moved to Cambridge anyway. If you’re starting a biotech business, it just makes sense to go where the others are.