HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Robert Buderi.

He's an American journalist, author and editor.

He served as technology correspondent and editor for Business Week, and for MIT's Technology Review, editor in chief, he's the author of the new book, Where Futures Converge.

Welcome, Bob.

BUDERI: Hey, thank you for having me.

HEFFNER: Delighted to have you today.

Excited to discuss the book, Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub.

What inspired you about Kendall Square?

People know Harvard Square, but Kendall Square has a hugely rich and impactful history.

When did you decide to tackle this project to chronicle it?

BUDERI: I've been working, living, studying in Kendall Square for some 30 years.

It's been called the most innovative square mile on the planet and it's this incredible concentration of startups, big company, high tech innovation.

As I had a media company that we sold, I started thinking about what I should do next to go back to writing.

And I thought this story of this innovation hub right next to Boston, that people come from all over the world to learn about was really poorly understood, the long history of it.

So I thought this is going back about 2018 that I thought I would begin to tackle this as a narrative history.

HEFFNER: So you trace the stories of companies like Moderna, Pfizer, also hubs, IBM, Amazon, Facebook.

But what to you in this moment is the most meaningful, we'll retrace the history, but what would you say is most meaningful that's going on in Kendall Square as we speak?

BUDERI: What's happening right now, there's kind of two major threads that I see and one is this incredible convergence that we all see around us of the life sciences, biotechnology, biology, and computer sciences.

And that is engendering tremendous innovation in healthcare, Artificial Intelligence, all these things.

And that's something we all see in Kendall Square.

It's kind of on steroids because it's startups, big companies, new students coming out of MIT, especially, all coming together on this.

And the other thread is something that's much harder to see.

It's these same people and companies, or many of the same types of people and companies, beginning to look anew at some of the big problems and challenges the world faces, like energy, water, and the environment.

And we can't see as well where those things are going to come out.

But if history tells us anything, it's that these new innovations could take us by surprise and tackle some of these big problems.

HEFFNER: How have the relationships changed between Massachusetts, the state, and the universities surrounding the square or the students and faculty immersed in the square, namely MIT, Harvard, Tufts also, BU, BC.

How have those relationships changed between how the state and the universities function within this environment of Kendall Square?

BUDERI: I don't know so much about the state government.

I think there's been this growing awareness over the last multiple decades that new innovations are coming out of these universities, young students, and the convergence of these new technologies.

And I think there's been an embrace of that at all the universities you mentioned.

The focus on entrepreneurship startups, new innovation has dramatically increased.

And the state has been open to it and helped fund a lot of new startups or startup spaces, things like that.

HEFFNER: I mentioned the state because Massachusetts consistently is ranked as one of the best states for education, not just higher education, public education, one of the most livable states.

And I wonder if this is an example of not outsourcing human capital and intellectual endeavor, but managing to incubate this in a way that brings sustenance to the people of the state.

Not to suggest that Massachusetts is some glory land panacea for all social problems, nor Boston or Cambridge, but something maybe going on here that is a model in a constructive way that feeds innovation without a stranglehold on the local population in a negative way.

BUDERI: It's a tough question.

There's no simple kind of way to describe it or solve it if you're trying to replicate this kind of thing.

This amazing concentration of universities and colleges all around Boston, something like a hundred of them, is presenting this wellspring of young talent.

Now, a lot of that talent goes away.

And, and people in Boston lament the, you know, we are losing 75% or whatever the number is of college grads are moving out of Boston.

But they don't look at the flip side the way you kind of described it, which was 25%, or whatever the number is, are staying, and that's a big number.

And they're feeding back into this innovation economy.

I don't think it's anything the state really did.

It's the environment that's there with the universities, the availability of capital venture capitalists and other funders of things and this culture of innovation.

And that's very hard to replicate if you're somewhere else.

HEFFNER: On the flip side, Bob, you say that this is gentrification gone rogue.

You chronicle the lack of accessible housing.

The fact that Moderna and companies like it are building a state of living that's accessible to maybe its employees, but not the rest of Boston or Cambridge.

So, you know, looking at this as an ever-evolving situation or problem, like I would think, and hope your book was being read by the people there, enough that they can, they can bring to these conversations an informed perspective about how to further grow the square.

BUDERI: I think it's a really good point.

I tried the hard to look at the challenges because it's not just this great story of innovation.

It can be the most innovative square mile on the planet, but it is running the danger of freezing out a lot of the middle class and the workers that traditionally have been in east Cambridge around this area.

And so this is something I tried to dive into, talk to citizen groups and neighborhood groups.

And I think the companies are very aware that there's a whole need for talent that's not like with PhDs or even college degrees to do manufacturing, to work in well-paying jobs.

And then they have to have affordable housing around there, and so these are things that are all underway or being addressed to some degree, and we don't know how successful they'll be.

HEFFNER: Well, you've covered technology for a long time.

I think that a fair stereotype or generalization about technology's impact on contemporary society is that it's increased efficiency and has simultaneously imperiled humanity, or specifically human health and wellbeing.

So the efficiencies net output, while it might be good in the way that the booster from Moderna is constructed, the net output for people as a whole may actually be a worse ballgame.

While there are problems being solved in the Square, there's a bigger problem being created.

Now tell me if that's a wrong thesis, and if so, whether it's wrong or right, you must have, in all of your career covering technology for Business Week and MIT Technology Review, you must have thought, as you reviewed products and chronicled profiled innovators, these people are on their way to making society a lot better through technology.

And I wonder if you can fairly conclude that that happened or did not happen at this point.

BUDERI: I challenge that, you know, statement, I think overall, the, the, the march, the steady march of high-tech innovation technology has made the world a better place.

Certainly, enabled us to address major challenges in healthcare and transportation, you know, all kinds of things.

But it, but it has, it does come, it's not a straight line thing and it's not all good.

And you, you can talk about the ability of computers and AI to find new drugs, but they can also take away our privacy, and it depends a lot on who's behind them and how they're being used.

If you're kind of an optimist about humanity the way I am, I think we turn through these problems, we face them and ultimately, we're better off.

But I recognize that we may not be.

HEFFNER: Right.

One example clearly of a pro-social output is here's this company, Moderna, that was working on mRNA vaccines, and most of society was not clamoring for them or aware the of their potential necessity to stave off even more millions of people dying from the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, there's an example of where while salaries have increased and housing has increased, the specific design of what they were producing was immediately important and helpful to protect human life.

BUDERI: Yeah.

I think the whole story of Moderna, which I actually created a map in in the book.

It kind of reflects this thing about the Boston Kendall Square ecosystem.

All the people, all the key founders were with almost within walking distance of each other within a few square miles.

And they could get together and talk about their ideas and innovation in this firsthand way that I think kind of turbocharged the founding of that company.

So it was founded in 2010, but you know, 11, 12 years later, it's addressing this global challenge in this completely unique way.

HEFFNER: What would you say is the next frontier of innovation in Kendall Square?

What's being developed there now, not necessarily in the medical space but quite possibly, that is going to have that same kind of revolutionary impact?

BUDERI: That's a big one.

I would say in the biological fields, there's a lot of you know, places like Biogen, but also many startups and at MIT and Harvard and all these universities that look at neurological diseases, especially like Alzheimer's.

I had Phil Sharp, Nobel Prize winning biologist at MIT and founder of Biogen, who predicted that predicted that big advance in Alzheimer's and neurologic is going to come out of quite likely Kendall Square.

And that's such a huge issue.

If we can slow that down or even cure it.

And there has been a Biogen drug that was approved and has had some promise, but I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg on that.

Then there are these other things that I kind of alluded to earlier.

These new types of startups that are tackling things like energy.

Like here we have this war in Ukraine and a big part of it the effect was on global energy supplies and so forth.

Well, there's fusion startups in Kendall Square.

We have no idea if they're going to- there've been fusion startups before and they haven't gone anywhere.

But is there a new power source that could wean us off of oil, that kind of thing?

HEFFNER: Can you elaborate on that fusion?

What do you mean by that?

BUDERI: It was a long sought after power source for kind of cheap, affordable, abundant.

And if you in theory, do it right, clean energy.

And this has been a kind of holy grail for a long time since the days of nuclear power.

But it hasn't come to fruition.

It's been a huge problem and challenge and, and now I think you're seeing new steps.

I don't know if they'll come to fruition or not, but that's something that gets me excited.

There's a huge problem as well in, in the U.S. and everywhere about groundwater contamination.

Well, there are companies looking at how do you produce clean water and keep water clean and those kinds of things.

And can you take, you know, ocean water and desalinate it in new ways that kind of- HEFFNER: That's an interesting point.

It's something I mention often on The Open Mind in our programming, the importance of a political consensus around clean water and air.

You described that as a crisis right now, or a looming crisis, water contamination as an issue in the United States.

I think you people might associate that with what happened with lead pipes in Flint, Michigan, but I don't know that there is a consciousness in this country about a problem with the water.

BUDERI: Yeah.

Well, I'm not sure it's how universal is.

It's certainly been more and more information.

I think The New York Times had a big story this year about the groundwater contamination all around the country.

HEFFNER: As a result of exploration, fracking, or just because infrastructures haven't have become obsolete?

BUDERI: I don't know all the causes, but here in New Hampshire, one of the big causes is poor leaking septic systems that leak into the groundwater.

You can see that, okay, is there a way to clean it up?

Is there a way to produce septic systems that are more secure?

Those kind of things that are the kinds of things that startups tackle.

I don't happen to know of any, but it's just the kind of problem that I'm sure there are multitudes of startups looking at.

HEFFNER: What I'm trying to get at Bob is, is whether the impetus, what animates the innovators in Kendall Square right now is more in the post-Tesla and -Amazon state of mind for Bezos and Musk, which is the wellbeing outside of our realm.

I think there are some instances of work they're doing in the realm of human endeavor on this planet, but they're very obsessed with shooting into galactic space.

And then there's of course the pursuit of Tesla and pro possibly Uber too, working towards automated vehicles, autonomous self-driving cars.

It's not clear that exploration of outer space or self-driving cars are really the kinds of innovation that we need right now.

To Musk's credit, the Starlink system has provided satellite internet to, and can potentially provide it to every being, irrespective of economic status in this planet.

And if that were made available to every person, that would be a huge triumph.

That being said, the kind of scintillating things in the minds of the chief innovators of this country are not necessarily connected to the everyday wellbeing of people.

The water issue is.

The outcome of the water issue is.

I'm just trying to understand now who are the mentors informing the work of innovators in Kendall Square right now?

BUDERI: It's this combination of the professors, other entrepreneurs who are giving back and supporting people, even the venture capitalists who, yeah they want to make money.

But one of the things that you got to that I think is really important, and there's no way to prove that it's true, but it's certainly true in the culture of the innovation around Boston and Kendall Square.

They look to Silicon Valley and they think, there's great things happening there.

People want to make a lot of money.

They want to do things like self-driving cars and shoot into space.

But in Kendall Square in Boston, they point with pride to take on things like Alzheimer's, we take on things like clean water, we take on things like new energy forms.

And it's not that there isn't happening in Silicon Valley and other places around the world, but there's a very strong ethos that we want to help people and the world.

And it kind of comes before making money or having a new app.

HEFFNER: It, it seems to me, Bob, that there's a mentality driving innovation there that is not the predominant mentality in Silicon Valley.

BUDERI: Yeah.

It could have something to do with the whole roots of New England and the culture and the work ethic and all that.

People theorize about it all the time.

There's just no way to say conclusively what it is.

HEFFNER: And this may or may not be related to anything on your mind for the book, but I have to ask you just out of pure curiosity and fascination.

I mentioned to our viewers, you covered technology a long time.

Did you think the Internet would be such a huge focal point of how we think of innovation for the last two decades?

Of course, Google, now Alphabet, you know, Facebook, Meta, and I think many of us who came of age, still young enough to see the flying cars in the movies did not necessarily think that the Internet would be the sole focus of innovators.

And that, if we were going to work on gadgets and gizmos, that we'd have some alternative to automobiles.

Not different kinds of automobiles, but actually our own little flying projectiles.

We have drones, but we don't have flying cars.

And you've covered this stuff for the last few decades, and that's been portrayed in movies, and I'm sure also nonfiction accounts of looming innovation.

And some of this stuff just never happened.

So I'm wondering how you reflect on it.

BUDERI: Well, I of course immediately saw the, the importance of the, this internet, right?

When the first, you know, connection was made over at UCLA- Not.

I think that's a big lesson.

It comes out from looking at the history of technology, especially in Kendall Square.

The big thing is traditionally missed by the great majority.

The next big thing is traditionally missed by the great majority of the pundits and futurists and all that.

And that's why I'm very hesitant.

I think there're these things we see, like the convergence of AI, computing, and biology, and there's the things we don't see, and that's why I'm theorizing.

HEFFNER: The actual mechanical changes of systems has, has not really sprung into new being.

I know that people are working on robotic AI programmed coded things, but like, again, the example of an alternative to a car.

The mechanical development, just didn't catch up to the coding in my view.

BUDERI: I guess what you're saying in some ways that you don't see a lot of like fundamental changes in the way we do traditional things.

It's the same types of machines, the same types of things.

HEFFNER: Right.

BUDERI: Yeah, I mean, I see that.

But at the same time, look at this, this isn't that, and look how it's changed the world.

And, there's some good things that came out of that too.

HEFFNER: Let me put it to you this way, is there machinery you want in your life that you still don't have?

BUDERI: No, there's not, I don't think there's machinery.

I think one people that I talked to talked about the creation of drugs, a new drug.

And, you know, it could be that the cure for the disease, I don't have yet has already been invented, but it hasn't been approved because somebody died off it or some people in a trial.

Well, with the power that it's kind of coming out now, it can be much more predicted.

Well, it will work on you, Alexander or you, Bob, but it won't work on Joe or Jenny over there.

HEFFNER: Right, right, right.

BUDERI: So those kind of things, much more precision medicine.

Things like that.

To me, that's not a machine, but it could really transform things.

HEFFNER: Before the pandemic, we did an episode with Maria Freire.

I asked her about genomic solutions to medical problems.

They were theoretically working on this to prepare for a pandemic and how we each, in the case of COVID, in the example that you described, we each respond differently, some fatally, some not.

But I hear what you're saying.

In that respect too, the advanced knowledge of our genomic data have not caught up with the coding, so maybe it's not the machinery.

But in that respect- BUDERI: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How we put it together, how we apply it, those kinds of things.

HEFFNER: Is that because it's so expensive like work around DNA and understanding how our DNA reacts to certain stimuli or disease?

BUDERI: I don't think it's expensive.

I think it's the complexity of it and, and how do does a drug actually work in a body and all the things that are involved in understanding that and predicting it tremendously complex.

And yet it's not infinite.

And this was something that really came home to me as I was doing interviews for this book, that there are a set, a finite number of interactions and stuff that the human body and drugs can do.

And eventually computer power is going to be able to run through those and get these answers that we don't.

But when that day is, I don't know.

You got me thinking.

And one of the things I really thought a lot about is, okay, in something like Moderna or these new innovations, a lot of what happened around, say, the COVID vaccine, what, it wasn't just Moderna by itself or Pfizer by itself.

They relied on collaborations with other scientists and universities and companies all over the world.

And there was a trust factor.

And I had someone point out to me that one of the reasons for that trust factor that enabled this collaboration, yeah, we had this great crisis, but people had worked together before they'd gone to school together before, they may have gone a job somewhere in some other country or some other city.

But if in this day of post-COVID, if we're not interacting as personally as we had in the past, I had a guy at the Broad Institute tell me the vaccine was produced because there'd been collaborations over the previous 20 years and people had built up this trust.

But if we're not continuing to build up that trust, what happens with the next one?

So that's something I think about.

HEFFNER: Absolutely.

Well, keep thinking about it.

And we very much appreciate the history that you chronicled in Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub.

Bob, I think folks will be enticed by our conversation to learn about precisely what's gone on and what is going on in Kendall Square.

Thank you for your insight today, sir.

BUDERI: Thanks for having me, Alexander.

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