Growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1970s, as one of us (IO) did, was not necessarily a good time to fall in love with the city. It was a time of historic blackouts, the Son of Sam, and the infamous Daily News headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. But it was also a decade during which the Yankees went back to the World Series, and the city began rebounding. In many ways, it hasn't looked back.
The life sciences industry's relationship with New York is more complicated, even the reverse. Things tend to start well. The city's 25 biomedical institutions and 147 hospitals get more than $1 billion in funding from the NIH annually, and the area's institutions have been granted more biotechnology patents than any other region. Some of the graduates and faculty of those institutions create an average of 30 biotech startups per year.
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