Pittsburgh: The Comeback | TIME

Pittsburgh is a city that will surprise you when you come here you'll expect to find rusted mills falling into a dirty river as you come through the Fort Pitt tunnel coming down a highway we're nothing around you is anything but trees and then all of a sudden opens up into this beautiful downtown area where the rivers are running and a fountain is going in the background of anywhere you look is a tapestry of green of trees and there are bridges between neighborhoods here that's an important concept can you build enough bridges can you keep it all together and it's a living metaphor there's a really an infusion of ideas and a belief now we're no longer back on our heels there's really a strong belief that we can continue to build from a position of strength over time the focus on EDS and meds and high knowledge really has taken off it has more than a foothold in the digital economy in robotics in the Nance in medicine I think this aspect of super high tech Pittsburgh has been bubbling away for about 50 years this is really Pittsburgh's time this is a small American city but we have one of the country's leading Symphony Orchestra's Ballet Theatre terrific restaurants lots of bicycle lanes this is a city that captures the sophistication of the East Coast and retains the civility of the middle west to so many people that have the low expectation to be taken away by what they end up seeing is something that is unique Pittsburgh is a product of geology and water where two rivers meet to form the Ohio to the southwest lie rich coal fields a key ingredient of steel Pittsburgh's ability to make sell and move steel created the fortunes of Hillman Hines Mellon Carnegie and the futures of many immigrants who moved here four mighty corporations going into the 70s Pittsburgh was a metal town as you get into the 80s America begins the industrializing and it hits here very very hard my first front-page story at the newspaper was one of the last big steel strikes and people just their identity had been taken away there was a feeling that it became less important but the good news for Pittsburgh is it had a strong educational and research base the captains of industry recognized a huge responsibility to Pittsburgh the great family fortunes poured money into foundations that made the city a direct beneficiary this historic wealth was the institutional glue that helped hold the city together while it regenerated new skill sets I would say that the revolution here in Pittsburgh really started with the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University things started going crazy in the 1990s when you had this huge group of people doing big algorithms and systems for manipulating massive flows of data the department was very strong in artificial intelligence and related technologies these two worlds hit each other at the same time and then in the last ten years we've had this explosion and out of that department the robotics Institute was created robotics is a very a multidisciplinary field we have people come from mechanical engineering people conform even physics math of course computer science my most important duty here is Dean is to create the computer scientists who are frankly I believe going to be running the world in 2040 one of the tallest buildings here has the initials UPMC the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that was called the u.s. steel building once so that tells you of a tectonic shift in the economy where medicine becomes more important than primary metals UPMC has a large provider organization where the largest private employer in western Pennsylvania 60,000 employees 3,500 physicians over 20 hospitals we have petabytes of data related to health care this is one of the few medical schools in the country being driven by our interest in research that mandates that all of our medical students undertake research for all four years of their medical student ship this is the national robotics engineering center so it is the tech transfer arm of the robotics Institute and in this Center we do applied research and development for companies in the areas of agriculture mining and oil and gas and also for the government chimp stands for CMU's highly intelligent mobile platform the chip project began three years ago we wrote a proposal to the government to get funding to build our own robot that has over 10,000 parts this is a zebrafish facility it is one of the biggest in the world surprisingly zebrafish is very closely related to the humans that are vertebrates just like we are and so the basic body pattern of the way the brain and spinal cord and peripheral nervous system is arranged is almost identical to humans it serves the basic plan so chimp can grab and turn evolve open the door is able to drop down on all four limbs and drive on four tracks like a tank one of the stories with Fukushima is that if a person had gone in and turned a critical valve and vented that gas out to the atmosphere you would have still had the nuclear meltdown but you wouldn't have had the explosions so the idea with chimp is that you send a robot in because the robots not going to have those same problems what we're working on is making genetically modified zebra fish that recapitulate certain aspects of the pathology of Parkinson's disease and so if we have a large library of potential drugs that we want to screen that potentially could be effective treatments for Parkinson's disease you know we can screen these very very quickly against a zebrafish model and that's really the reason for using that as the model organism a lot of the patients I look after I've got diseases that are incurable and for them research is is hope now hoping that one day this is going to translate into something that's going to improve their quality of life or even cure their disease what's happening is that as the amount of data is getting much larger the knowledge is still kind of a small kernel but it's getting higher and higher quality we've announced that we have assembled all of these interests Carnegie Mellon the Medical School UPMC to collate mine and extract from this big data what Pittsburgh has what Silicon Valley doesn't and what Boston doesn't have as good as us is that we have the ability to create world-class research to become a global innovation Center for corporations around the world these large companies are desperate to get hold of our graduates once that happens you start attracting other businesses you attract uber you attract Google I spent a lot of my time talking to companies saying Andrew how can I get three times as many of your graduates next year than I got this year that translates into new research labs that translates into new application this transit even even into investments in products and so forth and and Pittsburgh is at the forefront of this yes Pittsburgh today is our regional indicators project we compared Greater Pittsburgh with 14 other regions across the u.s. to get people kind of a deeper sense of how Pittsburgh is doing Pittsburgh ranks at or near the top of all sorts of quality of life measurements across the US and frankly across the world and because of the really anomalously rich philanthropic wealth that we have here the social programs are strong the arts are almost freakishly strong for our size I think what Pittsburgh learned is that the world didn't end even if skilled it to learn it early and to be able to evolve from that is is a great advantage going ahead in some respects this is a segregated City there are differences in quality of life between the white and african-american communities and that's an area where efforts are redoubled for some there isn't the opportunity to be a part of it so we have to look at ways that the jobs that we're creating aren't only being created for the PhD but for the GED because we can't really afford to have members of this community not take part in a successful meaningful way if you're tracking people are willing to spend money you know that's a good thing are the people going to be feel that they are going to be left behind well yeah that will be an issue I'm the mayor of the city that I love I'm the mayor of the city that my grandfather decided to come to it's everything in here flows through and it's not just me it's the people that live here our blood is black and gold and we believe that

Channel: TIME

Views: 245,366

Rating: 4.9031811 out of 5

Keywords: Time (Magazine), Pittsburgh (City/Town/Village), Data (Website Category), Innovation (Quotation Subject), Science (TV Genre), steel city, industry, Unemployment (Quotation Subject), economy, Economics (Field Of Study), rebirth, pittsburgh the comeback, the rebirth of pittsburgh, time original, original series, technology, business, science, news, money, united states economyTime, time magazine, magazine, time (magazine), time.com, news today, world news, interview, health, politics

Id: MMCO_NTcRxI

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/djricecakes]

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