Years ago, The New Yorker magazine published an illustrated map of the United States that soon became a classic. It showed the East and West coasts dominated by tall buildings, with the centre of the country represented as a disproportionately tiny wasteland. This misconception persists. Recently, New York mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg quipped that any business that moved from New York City “might as well be in Iowa in the cornfields”.

In fact, the former fields of Iowa and other midwestern states are providing fertile ground for science and technology. Michigan is pouring millions of dollars into a 'life sciences corridor' (see Spotlight). Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, continues to be a major contributor to the human genome project. And the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, is recruiting internationally to fill its new campus (see Movers).

Midwestern research institutions, like their coastal cousins, also create synergistic relationships with industry. For example, in 1925 a group of alumni from the University of Wisconsin-Madison established a licensing body to commercialize vitamin D, discoveries made by Professor Harry Steenbock. It has since obtained over 1,000 patents, including one for immortalized human embryonic stem-cell lines. As well as aiding the creation of spin-off companies, such arrangements mean money gets ploughed back into the university. Both outcomes result in an abundance of jobs. Madison, like other biotech hotspots around the world, tends to have a much lower unemployment rate and a higher per capita income level.

And scientists who relocate from Cambridge or Palo Alto to Madison, Missouri or Michigan will find housing prices and traffic congestion are both far more favourable — proving that the open spaces mocked by coastal defenders can actually be an advantage.