Yes on Question 2

Question 2: Do you favor a $5,000,000 bond issue for biomedical and marine research and development by Maine-based nonprofit and state research institutions?

Pick any study or prod any political candidate about what makes for a strong economy and everyone will provide an answer that includes a strong education system and an investment in desirable jobs. Questions 4 and 6 help the education side, Question 2 is about jobs that are important now and will become more important in the future to Maine. Voters should support this question with an enthusiastic yes.

You wouldn’t know it from the way the question is worded on the ballot, but this proposal to spend $5 million for biomedical and marine-based research brings in an additional $40 million in federal funding. At an 8-to-1 match, it is the best return on the ballot, but even that doesn’t adequately describe its positive effect.

One example of that effect, and the reason for linking it with education, could be found in the announcement Tuesday at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. It recently received a $5.5 million grant to teach hands-on training to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Maine, College of the Atlantic, Bates College and Colby College. MDIBL can win these sorts of grants to help Maine students because it is building the infrastructure to expand operations; it can build the infrastructure because the state has invested in research and development.

At the center of Question 2 are the profound advances in health research that improves lives worldwide. Those benefits come to Maine, of course, as do good jobs that produce them, the kinds of jobs people can make into careers. From maintenance to tech and lab support to hands-on research the jobs created would offer opportunity for a wide range of skills. And they would include the kind of jobs for which Maine students attend college, graduate, then leave the state to find work. These jobs mean they can stay and prosper in Maine.

The effect of this bond can be seen in the results of a $10 million state grant to these institutions last year. The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, for instance, received more than $6 million of the state support to help build a genetic resources building and leveraged another $30 million from the National Institutes of Health. The Maine Medical Center Research Institute in South Portland used just under $1 million in state money to expand its work in heart and bone disease and cancer, attracting an added $11 million from NIH. The Foundation for Blood Research in Scarborough used $81,000 for a computer upgrade and leveraged $6 million in NIH and other grants.

The 10 institutions that received the state money, including the University of Maine, have already more than quintupled the initial investment, carrying out important research, creating hundreds of new jobs in emerging fields of medicine and health and spinning off more than $100 million in related benefits. Expect more to come. In a year of dismal economic news, research and development in Maine keeps growing and keeps spinning off more work to other Maine businesses – from new housing to specialty products for labs to wood shavings for the mice at The Jackson Lab – 83 percent of the money the labs receive stays in Maine.

The Maine Science and Technology Foundation just released an evaluation of R&D generally in Maine and the results, for those who have labored over it for the last seven or eight years, are humbling. Maine is doing better than it did in 1995, the report says, but it is nowhere near the investment level made by other states and so is not seeing the kinds of gains experienced elsewhere. Maine must try harder; it must make R&D a larger part of its economy. It can begin by supporting Question 2 on Tuesday’s ballot.