Wings of mosquitoes and a new neighborhood

It used to be, in this neighborhood you could get your car's windshield replaced easier than getting your genome mapped.

But less so now, as a Seattle community of small shops, parking lots, tire stores and one large newspaper building has steadily marched into the biotech future, hardly aware the parade had started. South Lake Union and the Cascade neighborhood, described by former University of Washington President Lee Huntsman as potentially "Genome Shores," has taken on wings. In the case of one research institution, those are the tiny wings of mosquitoes.

At Seattle Biomedical Research Institute on Westlake Avenue, research scientists toil at 31 federal grants and dozens of esoteric projects, including the battle against mosquito-borne malaria, a serial-killer disease responsible for about 2 million deaths a year.

Some five years after it received a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant of $5 million, the institute has become one of the country's leading investigators into finding antigens — the proteins that stimulate the immune system, as SBRI explains it — that would fight malaria among pregnant women and children.

SBRI occupies a modern building filled with sunlight, microscopes, high-tech freezers and connections to Africa, Asia and other places where childhood death lingers. A few floors above Westlake sidewalks, it breeds tropical mosquitoes in a sealed room, and looks into the stone heart of jungle and swamp.

Institute researchers are also interested in swatting back a rise in tuberculosis among the homeless population in Seattle.

The unsettling rise of TB — one planeload of passengers from Russia can bring several live cases to the U.S. — gives urgency to the job of tracking the disease. Researchers explain that a particular strain has emerged dominant among Seattle's street people, pushing out other strains. TB's return to Seattle's streets only shows that we are vulnerable to a world of diseases.

Today's lead editorial on the following page deals with that issue through Gov. Christine Gregoire's initiative to pour some money into bioresearch at three scientific centers — UW, Washington State University and the national labs in Richland. The governor found $350 million lying around and dedicated it to bolstering the state's competitiveness in bioresearch. If Washington doesn't, the thinking goes, California or Massachusetts or North Carolina will eat our biotech lunch.

As the Brookings Institution reported last year, Seattle is in the second tier of metropolitan regions capable of attracting and holding world-class biotech research. The first are the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.

No one considers SBRI second tier, certainly not the University of Washington research arm or the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. All work closely with SBRI.

How this fits into the future of Seattle and this little, hilly Cascade neighborhood, no one can say, other than to feel the optimism that fuels new, lightning-rod industries. Biomed is the hottest topic among real-estate developers, grant-seekers and politicians.

It looks like one of those winning growth-makers that brings money and prestige to a town. People don't quite know what it does, but whatever it does is probably good, and without smokestacks. The rush is on to get it.

Here in Cascade, between the outdoor world of REI and the indoor world of SBRI, the city's future tries to fly.

Where's NEXT?

After two years of essays and opinions from writers of the next generation, the page devoted to their words and ideas goes away as this Sunday Opinion section adjusts to fewer resources. NEXT writers will continue appearing on Times op-ed pages on a regular basis. NEXT will continue to appear online as essays run in the daily opinion pages.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com. Look for more of his thoughts on the STOP blog, our editorial online journal at www.seattletimes.com/stop