A key part of the financing for the Medtronic deal in Minneapolis involved the site's partial location in a redevelopment district, which qualified the project for special tax increment financing. Backed by solid research, Keewaydin and Medtronic officials were able to convince the state legislature to extend that district's borders to include the entire site -- a move that cinched the deal and which will result in the near-doubling of total tax incentives.
      Such planks in a development plan are becoming more common as both companies and communities look to renovate downtowns and clean up brownfields.
      Building rehab and re-use of formerly contaminated property not only makes economic sense, it often makes common sense to a company's customers and stakeholders.
      While the life sciences are primarily focused on microscopic developments, their growth may have received its biggest green light in late December from a macroscopic event, when the U.S. Congress passed landmark federal brownfields legislation aimed at redevelopment of old industrial sites.
      The Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act will not only give states and municipalities up to $250 million a year for five years to clean up polluted industrial sites, but also protect developers from liability for the wastes that previously existed at the sites.
      "This much-needed legislation will help the real estate industry effectively clean up and redevelop hundreds of thousands of brownfield sites," said National Assoc. of Realtors President Martin Edwards Jr. "Cleaning up hazardous waste sites and redeveloping them for commercial and residential use makes good sense for the environment, the economy and communities."
      Genetics Institute's new four-story research facility and corporate headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., is built on the site of a former railroad yard and fertilizer plant. On the opposite coast, Slough Estates' 22-acre (9-ha.) Shearwater development -- home to Rigel Pharmaceuticals, AGY Therapeutics and Raven Biotechnology -- is on a former brownfield. So is Slough's other project, on remediated acreage formerly home to Fuller O'Brien operations that the developer purchased late in 2000 and hopes to build on this spring.
      As Glenn Yago, Director of Capital Studies at the Milken Institute, said in a March 2001 presentation, the life sciences may be the key to unlocking the tremendous potential of environmental economics, effectively uniting both internal and external life systems in a new economic order.
      "New technologies allow capital-poor countries to preserve and leverage their natural resource economies into more diversified ones as well as advance human development for economic growth," Yago said. "They are also useful in resolving problems of contingent land development for brownfields. Fortunately, modern corporate finance and its application to financial institutions and capital markets provide a variety of financial technologies that address these problems."
      He advocated using financial innovation to not only reduce negative environmental impacts, but simultaneously breathe life into the life sciences that are dependent on the natural world's plant and animal species. After all, the life sciences come down to the essentials of animal and plant matter. In the U.S., nearly 25 percent of prescription medicines contain active ingredients derived from plants.
      "'Biodiversity prospecting' offers an opportunity to sift among genetic and biochemical resources for commercial value," Yago noted. "Capitalizing on new and better products for industrial, agricultural and pharmaceutical applications provides an important incentive for monetizing the value of biodiversity in the natural world, especially in developing countries where the majority of remaining plant species survive."
      As scientists and companies break down the body to solve more and more of its mysteries, what is being given back to build up that larger body that all companies inhabit may prove to be the ultimate sustainable solution.