How Smart Are We?

Recent surveys place San Diego squarely among the nation’s top 10 smartest cities. We are home to top-ranking universities and corporations, and our science and technology industries are at the head of the class. The report card says we’re smart——but just how smart are we?

IN 2003, WHEN The Economist wrote about San Diego, it didn’t mention baseball or tourism. It didn’t dwell on the sun, the surf, the perfect climate or on Southern California’s skyrocketing real estate. Instead, The Economist wrote about a San Diego that most tourists—or even locals—might care less about. They wrote about a place referred to by some as simply “The Mesa.”

“If there is an authentic biotechnology cluster anywhere in the world,” the article noted, “this is it.” Forbes called The Mesa the most densely packed biotech cluster in the United States. And the Milken Institute, an economic think tank named for its founder, Michael Milken, gave San Diego the top score on its 2004 Biotech Index.

Like the anchor tenant in a strip mall, over the years The Mesa (Torrey Pines Mesa, referred to by some as Biotech Beach) has attracted one of the highest concentrations of brainpower in the country. We hold the distinction, for example, of having housed the most Nobel Laureates in the world; 14 have called San Diego home over the years. Likewise, dozens of members of the National Academy of Sciences (membership is one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer) have lived and worked here.

Intellect, hidden under cover of sun and sand, abounds. In May, Karl Albrecht, local author and Mensan, won the first Mensa Intellectual Benefits Award for his book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success. (Mensa is the high-IQ club; San Diego has 815 members.)

“It’s easier to measure braininess by the outcomes than by the genetics of it,” says Thomas Scott, a neuroscientist and vice president for research at San Diego State University. (He’s also the interim CEO for the school’s Research Foundation.) “That is to say, what proportion of your community has college degrees, what proportion has advanced degrees —these are measures that are relatively objective and public.”

If college degrees are any measure of intelligence, then Seattle was the smartest city in the country last year. Using census data, in 2006 CNNMoney.com ranked cities by population and numbers of bachelor’s and advanced degrees. More than 40 percent of San Diegans hold bachelor’s or advanced degrees. By comparison, Seattle boasts that more than half of adults 25 or older surveyed there have college degrees. San Francisco and Raleigh, North Carolina, tied for runner-up with 50.1 percent, while Washington, D.C., was third with 45.3 percent. San Diego placed ninth in Money’s survey.

While biotech is the nucleus of San Diego’s smartness, Seattle’s brain magnet has been referred to as its “knowledge economy,” with Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing (among others) headquartered there and in outlying areas. Washington, D.C., home to possibly the largest concentration of attorneys and think tanks in the country, recruits heavily in the government sector. And San Francisco is known primarily as home to high tech and high finance.

Bizjournals.com, in a different 2006 survey, devised a way to rank America’s smartest cities by giving points for various levels of educational attainment: The more points, the higher the region’s brainpower. According to those results, San Diego weighs in at number seven among the top 10 smartest cities based on size.

THE SEEDS OF SAN DIEGO’S own economy of brainpower were planted decades ago when the Salk Institute opened its doors in 1963. The following year, the University of California, San Diego was established. Scott says it was the combination of climate, intellectual trappings, established wealth in La Jolla and the infusion of new cash from Sacramento that fueled the steady growth of the area’s intellect. “From Salk and UCSD came TSRI [The Scripps Research Institute], which by now has outstripped Salk in terms of its productivity,” he says, “and then later, the Burnham Institute.”

Ranked today as the seventh-best public university in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, UCSD placed 32nd on the magazine’s list of the country’s top 50 universities (public and private). UCSD also ranks seventh in the nation in National Academy of Sciences memberships among its faculty. In its time, UCSD has spun off hundreds of companies that have become the core of our biotech and info technology sectors.

“As of a year ago,” says Debra Kain, director of Health Sciences Research Communications at UCSD, “we were the top-funded research institute in the country, per researcher, from the National Institutes of Health.” In total funding amounts, UCSD has received in excess of $700 million, she says.

“Another major contribution is that our Alzheimer’s Research Institute is home to the national clinical trials network,” Kain says. She lists key UCSD programs in stem cell research, stem cell ethics research and HIV/AIDS. “We are currently setting up research centers in Mexico, Africa, Afghanistan and India.”

Fifteen miles to the east, San Diego State University was ranked recently as the number-one small research university in the nation, based on the 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. SDSU’s strongest area lies in clinical psychology, where, in collaboration with UCSD, they have the number-one-ranked Ph.D. program in the country.

“I would say,” says SDSU’s Scott, “that our greatest distinctiveness lies along a continuum that starts with biochemistry and moves into larger and larger units—cell and molecular biology, behavioral neuroscience, clinical psychology—and ends with public health. That continuum sweeps out into a group of maybe 50 or so researchers, all of whom are very well-funded, are highly published, have enormous national reputations and can pretty much stand up to almost any university’s wealth of faculty intellect. Outside those areas, we’re merely quite good.”

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Click here for a list of San Diego's Nobel prize winners

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The Council on Competitiveness reports that San Diego is also home to one of the nation’s top clusters of high-tech businesses. There are approximately 171,868 high-tech jobs in the county, representing more than 13 percent of all private-sector jobs here.

From Fast Company magazine: “One key event was the founding of an early wireless outfit called Linkabit by two pioneering UCSD professors in 1968. A generation later, spin-offs of Linkabit, such as Qualcomm, litter the local landscape, along with wireless divisions of larger companies such as Nokia and Siemens.”

Patenting activity is another regularly measured indicator of intellectual superiority; with New York on top, Forbes placed San Diego fifth on a recent list of top 50 big cities for patents issued.

HERE AT HOME, though, our local braininess is a hidden asset, seemingly taken for granted. San Diego doesn’t immediately offer up its intellectual clout in the same way traditional Ivy League brain trusts in the East do.

“I’m not sure why that is,” says David Brenner, UCSD vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine. “If you talk to people in Boston and San Francisco, they know. It’s not a secret from our colleagues and competitors. It just doesn’t seem to be played up in the sort of general San Diego things that people think about —yet it’s an enormous source of income and business and intellectual drive.”

Chuck Valverde agrees. He is one of the owners of downtown’s venerable Wahrenbrock’s Book House on Broadway. While the culture of intelligence is persistent in San Diego, he says it’s not always obvious.

“It’s something that’s not flaunted,” Valverde says. “I think you’ve got to seek it out. We have a pretty good opera season; we’ve got a good library system. The thing is, they are not afforded the same attention as the Chargers or the Padres or the surf. A lot of the people here place those things on a higher agenda.”

A definition begins to emerge of San Diego as a draw for the actively intelligent . . . and those who are both intelligent and active. “The joke I always like to tell is how many of my faculty surf,” says Brenner. “A lot of scientists come to La Jolla because they like the outdoors, or they develop a liking for the outdoors. I’m amazed how many of them do things outside. They’re not opera buffs. They don’t have traditional East Coast cultural interests.”

For the record, The Economist story mentions the beach exactly once, as if it’s inevitable one must mention the ocean in the same breath as San Diego. It comes at the end of the story, and it goes like this: “And yes, you can see the beach from some of the labs.”

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