As I read the article on life science "hot spots" for job seekers,1 I was struck by the fact that the strength and vitality of the bioscience industry in Maryland continues to be largely overlooked. Perhaps being in the shadow of the National Institutes of Health has caused many observers to fail to recognize that employment in Maryland's private sector bioscience companies might very well surpass that of federal bioscience laboratories in the near future. I will provide a few statistics here, but I will leave it up to others to determine which regions are truly "vying for third" (or first or second, for that matter).
In publications from MdBio Inc., we try to avoid the temptation to rank Maryland's bioscience industry in relation to other states. In the absence of clear definitions of what constitutes a biotech/bioscience/life science company, it is impossible to compare numbers across states or...