With its concentration of top universities and medical centers, New York City is fertile ground for scientific discovery – and for efforts to get those innovations to the bedside quickly. One New York University researcher, a transplant from another top life science center, describes the city has having nearly unmatched "academic energy."

But New York is also known for having an equally strong competitive energy, with the rivalry among academic centers sometimes taking precedence over the type of "crosstown" cooperation that is cited as strengths in some other cities. In San Diego, for example, collaboration among research centers such as the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Research Institute, and Salk Institute for Biological Studies – all relatively close to each other – is seen as essential, according to Andrea Moser of the San Diego's Regional Economic Development Corporation. In Philadelphia and Boston, preeminence in the field of pediatrics has been yielded to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, whose affiliated children's hospitals are the top in the nation.

Contrast that with New York City, in which the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, established the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in 2001. That created a rival to New York-Presbyterian's children's hospital, affiliated with the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

Dennis Charney, the dean of research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says that while collaborative opportunities exist, academic centers feel they must balance that spirit with the need to compete with each other. And Eric Rose, associate dean for translational research at Columbia University, says it's more the norm for New York academic scientists to team with global collaborators and with industry than with colleagues across Central Park. He adds, however, that signs of increased collaboration are emerging.

An example of friendly relations is the AMDeC, a seven-year-old consortium of New York State research institutions that includes New York City's top academic centers. "The whole reason AMDeC was created was to foster collaboration," says the organization's president, Maria Mitchell. While acknowledging what she calls a "healthy competition" among the city's academic centers, Mitchell says, "I think New York City institutions have really come a long way in collaboration, and I think they're actually ahead of other places in that they've set up this infrastructure."

In one new initiative, the AMDeC is setting up an integrated genomics program aimed at accelerating progress in the field through collaboration. The program will link the AMDeC's Bioinformatics Core, housed at Columbia's Genome Center, with the Microarray Resource Center, a network of microarray core facilities across the state.