Harvard Unveils Plans for 250 Acre Stem Cell and Life Sciences Campus

i-f031faea1789a822a9c5293755b12a08-HarvardCampus.jpg

There's a reason why Harvard continues to dominate institutional rankings. While some universities spend $100s of millions of dollars on their athletic programs and athletic facilities, Harvard sinks its $30 billion endowment into a 250 acre life sciences campus. From the news wires:

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Harvard University unveiled plans on Thursday for a multibillion-dollar campus expansion that aims to turn America's oldest university into one of the world's top hubs for stem-cell research and other life sciences. The plan, years in the making, will give a radical new look to Harvard's campus over the next 50 years in the most ambitious expansion in the school's 371-year history....

...Dubbed the Allston Initiative, the plan would turn industrial land now used as parking lots and truck and rail yards into an urban center with stores, tree-lined streets, bike paths and access to the Charles River, a popular destination for students and tourists....

...During the first 20 years of the expansion, Harvard would build 4 million to 5 million square feet of buildings and create at least 5,000 jobs, university officials said. Construction in Allston could begin this summer when Harvard hopes to break ground on a 500,000-square-foot (46,450-square-metre) science complex that will house the school's stem-cell researchers and other institutes. The science complex, university officials said, would be the nucleus for new interdisciplinary research and is expected to go a long way toward boosting Boston's economy by encouraging partnerships with biotechnology firms that may displace the region's long-fading manufacturing base.

Categories

More like this

Summers and the Allston expansion. Latest stats on gender and higher education. And free books! Ladies and Gentlemen start your hard drives. (all quotes+links below the fold) From today's Boston Globe: As Harvard University searches for a new leader, questions loom over its last president's most…
The same week Harvard unveiled its plans for a 250 acre Life Sciences campus, Scotland's University of Edinburgh announced a $115 million dollar Stem Cell Research Institute to be directed by Ian Wilmut. At universities across Europe, Asia, the US, and Canada, there's a race to be at the forefront…
Yeah, it's going to happen. From Corie Lok's blog: The 69-page report - PDF, submitted [Jan 11th] to the Boston Redevelopment Authority for review, proposes some pretty big changes to the Allston landscape. Here are the highlights: -putting part of Soldier's Field Road, the road that snakes…
In 2004, when California voters approved a $3 billion dollar funding program for embryonic stem cell research, all eyes turned to the Golden State as the new national center for research. Yet according to a new StateLine.org report, other states including Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York may…

Wow, that a lot of money. More than the full budget of my small university for the next decade, probably !