How The Lab Was Won

A leading genetics laboratory based in Maine committed today to establishing a $1.1 billion research institute at the UConn Health Center, a deal that provides an unexpectedly rapid return on Connecticut's new bioscience initiative -- and on a state official's subscription to a Downeast weekly paper.
The lure for Jackson Laboratory of Bar Harbor, Maine to select Connecticut over other suitors for its genomic medicine project was the Bioscience Connecticut initiative that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy rushed through the General Assembly last spring.
"Jackson Lab's desire to build a new facility was brought to my attention in late June," Malloy said today, joined by company officials, top Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and UConn's leadership. "I've been focused on it ever since."

The administration's biggest economic development coup--UConn officials say the institute will be a major step toward establishing the state as a bioscience center--is attributable to a major public investment, and a generous dollop of serendipity.
The high-tech project that Malloy says will rank as one of its most important accomplishments came onto the administration's radar via Timothy Bannon's mail subscription to a weekly paper, The Mount Desert Islander.
Bannon, who is Malloy's chief of staff, owns a second home in Mount Desert, Maine, near Bar Harbor, where Jackson has a 43-acre campus on the Gulf of Maine, near Acadia National Park. For years, Bannon was intrigued by lab, the region's major employer.
Last June, his wife, former UConn official Lori Aronson, read an article in the weekly about the collapse of Jackson's plans to open a research facility in Sarasota, Fla., due to the evaporation of proffered economic-development aid.
"She said, 'I think there may be an opportunity here,' " Bannon said.
Bannon clipped the article, scanned it into a computer and emailed a copy to Catherine H. Smith, the commissioner of economic development. Her top deputy, Kip Bergstrom, soon was on the phone to Maine to seek a meeting.
Around dawn on July 27, Bergstrom was speeding north in his Volvo wagon with Bannon and Marc Lalande, the chairman of genetics and developmental biology at UConn's medical school. Bergstrom shaved 45 minutes off the typical drive time of 6½ hours.
By the end of the day, Malloy and Smith joined the trio by video-conference from UConn Health Center in Farmington. Susan Herbst, the UConn president, appeared on a split screen from the main campus in Storrs.

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