From the outside, it looks like an unassuming office block but the enthusiastic director of Dusseldorf's Life Science Center, Thomas Heck, hopes to bring about nothing short of an economic renaissance.
On the Rhine, in Germany's once-mighty industrial heartland, fledgling high-tech firms are being coaxed into life in a strategy to transform Nordrhein-Westfalen from a former coal-mining, steel-milling powerhouse into Europe's leading base for biotechnology.
Rich in coal and well-connected to the rest of Europe, the land along the Rhine and Ruhr rivers has been the economic heart of Germany since the early 19th century. When Franz Hengsbach became the first bishop of the Ruhr region in 1958, he wore coal, instead of a diamond, in his signet ring. At the time, the coal, iron and steel industries employed more than 650,000 people.
Twenty years later thousands of coal and steel workers were out on strike, fighting for their jobs against cheap imports. By the late 1980s, only 4 percent of the workforce in Nordrhein-Westfalen was employed in coal or steel.
As the region's publicity blurb says, "The land of coal and steel has become the land of promising new industries." But unemployment is still nearly 10 percent, and the region's economy shrank last year as the decline of the traditional industries continued to take its toll.
BIOTECH HOPES
But Heck and his colleagues hope to nurture a network of vibrant new biotech firms that will feed off each other, learn from existing businesses in the area and create hundreds of new jobs. His center, built with Dusseldorf municipal cash, rents low-cost lab space to start-up companies, helps them with public relations, and chivvies the highly regarded local universities into offering equipment and help.
"It's not only the space, it's the co-operation between companies, and that's my task," Heck said.
Crucially, there is plenty of cash available, including grants for up to 45 percent of start-up costs for firms promising to create new jobs in research-based industries.
In the gleaming white lab spaces, some as small as 20m2, clutches of scientists are already crouched over test tubes and microscopes, searching for bankable discoveries and several established companies have said they would like to get involved.
With a highly educated workforce, good infrastructure and several large healthcare firms already in the region, including Bayer, Dusseldorf hopes it has a head start in what it calls "Germany's biotech revolution."
This kind of direct government intervention may sound like a blast from the past: the "white heat of technology" that UK governments in the 1960s and 1970s hoped to set ablaze by propping up companies that promised to be "national champions" in key industries.
These days, subsidies are out, evolve-or-die capitalism is in and the role of the state is, at most, to ease the pain of major changes in the economy -- such as the long-term decline of the manufacturing sector -- not to try to build new business sectors.
But Katinka Barysch, chief eco-nomist at the Center for European Reform, said there is an economic rationale for the support being offered in Dusseldorf.
"Germany doesn't particularly have a well-developed venture capital sector, and the banks tend to be conservative," she said. "I think there's a case to be made, in a country where funding is scarce, not to pick winners but to set up a platform for people who have an entrepreneurial idea to try to make that work."
Heck's sense of purpose stems from a wider acceptance in Germany that when changes in the global economy exact a painful cost from the workforce, the electorate expects the government to respond.
Nordrhein Westfalen is by no means an obscure choice: many of Germany's biggest businesses still have their headquarters here, and it attracts more inward investment than any other German region.
But the industries on which it has historically relied are shadows of their former selves. When the giant Thyssen Krupp steelworks at Duisberg, just north of Dusseldorf, closed down in 1993, 20,000 people lost their jobs and workers gathered on a bridge over the Rhine to vent their anger.
MONEY, MONEY
Here, again, the state government has thrown money at the problem. With the help of federal funding -- the state has a one-third share in the port -- the vast area of docks where the steelworks were based has been redeveloped and renamed Duisport.
This is an attempt to gain leverage from one of the huge assets the region still has: its position at the center of the EU. Duisport boasts that more than 150 million consumers are within eight hours' journey.
It cost 200 million euro (US$2.48 million) to redevelop the land, dismantling former factories and removing immense heaps of iron ore, but the port company is already turning a profit. Ford cars built in Belgium pass through the region to the UK; paper and coal comes in; steel goes out. A US firm, Tower Automotive, has just booked a spot on the huge complex to build doors for Daimler-Chrysler cars.
British transport firm Wincanton sends 10,000 trucks a night, packed with everything from oil to washing machines, across Germany from its monumental warehouse at the port, which also has a rail terminal.
The stacks of giant freight containers being shuttled about show that, whatever its problems, the German economy is still putting in a formidable export performance.
Job-creation is central to the project and Tobias Metten, head of corporate development for the port company, said it's important that many of the jobs go to former coal and steelworkers.
"Staff can retrain to do these jobs," he said, "they are not highly skilled."
Unemployment in Duisberg is still 14 percent, but Metten hopes to have created 5,000 jobs by 2010.
Back at the Life Science Center, which seems strangely quiet despite Heck's insistence that he's managed to let almost the whole of it, the government of Nordrhein Westfalen is playing a longer game, betting on the biotech sector -- and that's a risky business. When the center was first conceived, in 1998, biotech firms were the darlings of stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic, and cash was flooding into the companies that promised to translate cutting-edge science into profits. But the bubble inevitably burst, taking the stock prices of many fledgling firms with it.
QUESTIONS
But there is no acceptance in Dusseldorf that the government might have been trying to jump on a bandwagon that has now left town.
"When this was planned, the biotech sector was really good," Heck said. "But the companies founded now, maybe they will be more stable than companies before."
And there is at least one good precedent. Qiagen, based in bright modern offices in nearby Hilden, was founded in 1984, before biotech became fashionable, with an 80 percent start-up grant from the state government.
The firm, which sells solutions to purify nucleic acids from samples such as blood, now employs 750 people; has a dual stock market listing in the US and Germany and the unusual distinction in the biotech sector of being profitable.
For Joachim Schorr, its head of research and development, the trade-off is simple: "We have support for the biotech industry from the government: it has to make up for the decreasing business in the steel and mining industry."
Heck concedes it could be 20 years before the center can be judged a success or failure. But, just as at Duisport, no one is willing to contemplate the alternative.
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