In the new economy, factories are out. Computers, labs and researchers are in. Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories, which celebrated the biopark with sake, now owns the top two floors of the building.
"A decade ago, people said Baltimore was beyond the point of no return," said Anirban Basu, an economist and CEO of Sage Policy Group in Fells Point. "I don't think anyone would make that claim today."
The state's largest private employer is Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Institutions. Thanks to Hopkins, the state grabs the most federal research-and-development dollars per capita in the U.S. For every 100,000 workers, Maryland has more microbiologists than any other state, more physicists than any state but Colorado, and more database and network administrators than any place except Virginia and Delaware.
But for some, the changes have been wrenching.
Workers laid off from traditional manufacturing and industrial jobs see little personal benefit in the knowledge economy, which requires very different skills. And the blossoming biotech industry is no comfort to the Beth Steel retirees whose benefits disappeared a few years ago or the GM retirees who were told their health benefits will stop next year.
"We lost our health care, we lost our dental and optical and our life insurance," said Don Kellner, 70, president of a local Bethlehem Steel retirees association. "Everything."
The demands of the new economy are also roadblocks for thousands of residents who never worked in manufacturing but are being buffeted by the ripple effects of its long retrenchment. These are the workers with a high school education or less. They find themselves in jobs in hotels and other low-wage parts of the service sector, with no clear way out.
"Folks were able to provide for their families, they became homeowners, they sent their kids off to college - and these were manufacturing jobs," said Moses Hammett, director of work force development at the Center for Urban Families in the city. "When these manufacturing jobs left Baltimore, a lot of these opportunities left."
Knowledge jobs can leave, too, in good economic times as well as bad. The state's challenge is holding onto them, and growing, as competition increases.
The brain economy
The new economy is not thousands of people streaming into a factory each morning. It doesn't always lead to products as tangible as automobiles.
