Cities Bet on Biotech

States are spending a lot of money to woo biotech companies to their cities, despite the long odds, says the New York Times. The North Carolina Research Campus, also called the Biopolis, cost $500 million; Florida, particularly Palm Beach County, has spent $510 million to entice research institutes to head there (and Scripps and Torrey Pines did); and New York City is putting $45 million into science infrastructure. However, the Times says that skeptics see two problems, the first being that most biotech are near the biologically- and executively-talented Boston, San Diego, and San Francisco and biotech is a small industry that employs relatively few people.