A recent survey by the Brookings Institution in Washington (http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/) of almost 1,200 biotechnology companies in the 51 largest metropolitan centers in the United States reports that the industry is heavily concentrated in nine regions or “clusters.” These nine areas excel, apparently, because of their strong research and the ability to convert that research into commercial activity.

This is not at all surprising. Everybody in biotechnology loves clusters, defined as company groups sharing, roughly speaking, the same geographical location. In clusters, companies can efficiently use the high-cost, specialized physical infrastructure that has been put there by incubator centers or forward-looking real-estate developers—buildings that contain vented laboratory space, expensive equipment, and so forth. Clusters also provide an organizational infrastructure: crowds of venture investors, business angels, image consultants, intellectual-property and contract lawyers, and assorted advisors.

Outside clusters, companies struggle to dip into the pool of highly trained research and management personnel. Given the relatively short circulatory half-lives of many in the biotech industry, clusters offer employees the convenience of being able to recommit themselves wholeheartedly to a nearby bioscience firm when the company they had first committed to shows signs of wavering. And there is always the reassurance of having a nearby CEO or a neighborhood management consultant available when you need the odd word of encouragement.

According to the report, clusters seem to form semi-spontaneously and very slowly around centers of academic excellence. Perhaps this is because innovative scientific founders sometimes seem reluctant to leave their academic homelands and forsake their alma maters.

The biggest advantage of clusters may be the intensity of the local competition they produce. Such proximity in the personnel market makes the jobs of head hunters a lot easier and ensures that compensation packages are competitive. Local investors have a ready crop of nascent life-science companies that have been eased into existence by incubator centers and midwifely professionals. The demand for laboratory space close to academic centers is high, and so are the rents.

The romantic nostalgia that comes with the dog days of summer brings along with it, for some of us, a longing for the time before biotech clusters. Two decades ago, when today's senior executives were PhD candidates, there were hardly enough biotechnology companies to make a respectable cluster, even if they had all been stuffed into the same science park. Looking back, it is nothing less than miraculous that venture capitalists managed to beat the bushes to find those companies, that they survived and prospered without the full range of professional services now so conveniently offered, and perhaps most wondrous strange, that they managed to attract more-than-capable people to the hitherto déclassé hinterlands of Slough, South San Francisco, or Thousand Oaks.