The Ha'penny Bridge in Dublin

© Kelvin Wakefield / Istockphoto.com

When Aine Hanly completed her PhD in chemistry at the University of Ulster in 1994, she did what generations of Irish folk had done since the Great Famine of the mid-1800s: she emigrated to America. "At that point, no opportunities existed in Ireland. It didn't even cross my mind to try and apply for a job here," she says.

For more than a century, so many Irish had left Ireland in search of their dreams that any natural increase in population was constantly offset by waves of emigration, leading to a continual decline in population. Emigration was firmly embedded in Irish life and expressed in Irish culture - the subject of songs, poetry, and plays.

A sense of a forced exile to greater opportunity, and subsequent yearning to return home, is a distinctly Irish phenomenon that has invigorated the Irish economy and bioscience development in unexpected ways. Less than 15 years after the Lanesboro, County Longford native left for America, Ireland's boom economy now supports a growth market in which there are more jobs than people to fill them in many fields, especially in the biosciences and technology sectors.

Ireland's population has actually grown rather than declined, reaching numbers not seen since the mid-19th century (but even so, still a full third shy of the numbers living in the 26 counties of the Irish Republic before the Famine). Rather than each year bringing the latest emigration figures, the Central Statistics Office in Dublin now reports an annual net immigration. The most recent figures, for the 12 months to April 2006, indicate the highest number of immigrants - 86,900 - ever recorded since the government began tracking such numbers.

Nearly a quarter of those immigrants are the returned diaspora. By the early years of this century, almost half of immigrants were the returning Irish. Suddenly, there were jobs. Good jobs, especially in the sciences and technology. "The hard times exposed a lot of Irish people to the international market. Then the boom attracted Irish people in the biosciences industry back to Ireland. It brought in lots of international expertise; people who went away to learn pharmacology, complex chemistry and so on," says Ian Hunter, senior pharmacology and biotechnology analyst with Goodbody Stockbrokers in Dublin.

Indeed, the majority of Ireland's top life science researchers, clinicians, and academics worked abroad for some period after qualifying, as have enormous numbers the people filling all types of jobs within the biosciences sector. For example, at Wyeth Ireland, 10% of the workforce is recruited from abroad, according to Peter O'Brien, the company's communications director. Of that 10%, a full 50% are Irish - the diaspora flying back to the country they left years before.

The Networking Business

The returned Irish bring more than brainpower and experience. They also come trailing their connections - networks of professional and personal contacts from the country they left. That means critical networks linking back to influential people in influential places in the United States, Britain, Canada and elsewhere. For scientists and researchers, it means useful connections to jobs, venture capital, or collaborations, or perhaps a friendly hand offered to help complete grant or funding applications.

Then there are the diaspora who stay abroad. It isn't just the returned Irish who have been a key part of Ireland's drive to expand its pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors; it's also the Irish still dispersed. "There's the diaspora who have come back and there's the diaspora who stay. The international groups are great connectors in our business," says Ena Prosser, former director of Irish government agency Enterprise Ireland's Biotechnology Directorate and a member of the Advisory Science Council of Ireland.

"Those who left in the 1980s have graduated to very senior positions," she observes. Often those positions come in very useful for opening industry, academic, or government doors. "The ability to make a cold call is a very powerful ability to have."

Although Ireland isn't the only country with a significant diaspora returning to benefit life sciences research and industry - India, China, and Israel are also calling educated emigrants home - Prosser says the Irish are particularly adept at benefiting from the connections. "We're very good at using that network."

Indeed, for Ireland's diaspora, networking is not a casual affair. Irish biotechnology networking organizations such as Biolink USA-Ireland (and the UK counterpart, Techlink UK-Ireland), thrive on a membership largely derived from the Irish diaspora in the United States, and Americans of Irish heritage. Long-standing connections between Irish-Americans and the Irish - sentimental, but also cultural, financial, and industrial - offer another far-reaching support network on which to draw. Such organizations also keep databases of people seeking or offering work or skills in the United States, Ireland, or the United Kingdom. Irish organizations such as BioConnect and the Irish BioIndustry Association forge similar networking interconnections within Ireland, across the island.

How useful are such networks? BioLink has facilitated 15 strategic partnerships, investments in excess of $18 million, and four board of director appointments to startup companies. Genentech's investment in Opsona, Trinity College Dublin's biotherapeutics company, resulted from discussions at a Biolink conference; Pfizer has established a working relationship with Luxcel, a Cork screening-assay company; Cellix, a Dublin microfluidic assay startup, has forged connections with Amgen and Pfizer; and there are many more such deals. Biolink has also produced many US mentorships of Irish bioscience companies and supplied introductions and support for bioscience graduates moving to America.

Friends Overseas

US-based Irish scientists who have worked their way up the professional ladder and now have profile, influence, and excellent contact books are also key parts of the diaspora network. Garret FitzGerald, chair of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Pharmacology and director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, left Ireland in 1980 and spent the decade at Vanderbilt University, eventually becoming head of pharmacology. While he quips that a "homing gene" brought him back to Ireland briefly in 1991 to become chair of the Department of Medicine and Experimental Therapeutics at University College Dublin and director of the Center for Cardiovascular Science, he was lured back to America three years later, to UPenn, where he's been ever since.

Though FitzGerald says, "I'm not a great networking person, to be honest," probe a little deeper and it quickly emerges that he is a prominent supporter and recruiter of young Irish scientists, even at high school level, who come to work at his lab. Of the 100 or so people who have worked in his lab, "about 30 were Irish," he says, although "Irish" in the new prosperous Ireland of multinational immigrants has meant a Lebanese from the Ould Sod "and a Greek guy from Cork." He brings over 10 students every summer as interns, some from his alma mater, University College Dublin, and some from his Dublin high school, Belvedere. FitzGerald has also influenced the development of scientific research and education in Ireland by acting as a consultant to various national and academic bodies.

Kate Gunning, a biotechnology marketing and development consultant in Silicon Valley with her own company, BioVisibility, likewise left for the United States in the early 1990s. "We all moved to the US when there were no jobs in Ireland," she says. With a degree from the Dublin Institute of Technology and a visa won in a lottery to work in America, she first worked in nuclear medicine, and then was a key part of the Human Genome Project team at the Joint Genome Institute in California, eventually moving to the business side of biotechnology at Applied Biosystems.

That has left her with an invaluable network of contacts that she uses both in her professional life and her active role in Biolink, where she is the contact for Silicon Valley. "I get approached by Irish venture capitalists that are looking for Irish people with executive experience to move back," she says. She also uses her network to help early-stage bioscience companies get business advice and consultants.

Yearning for home

In 2002, after time teaching at Creighton College and at Yale University, and working at a small genomics firm on the human genome project, Aine Hanly came back home. "People were beginning to drift back in the early 2000s. I remember a New York Times article about the reverse in immigration; that really stuck in my mind," Hanly recalls. She had recently left the United States and gone to Britain to work for Pfizer when she got a call about a position in Ireland with Wyeth, which had just announced plans to build a new €1.8 billion ($2.8 billion US) biotechnology facility.

She jumped at the chance, with two motivations: "The job was the number one reason I returned, but the icing on the cake was that it was in Dublin." Her husband, who worked with Sun Microsystems, could comfortably transfer to work in Sun's Irish operations, so that eased the decision, too. She knew why she had been recruited: "I had all this global experience to bring back to Ireland."

Every one of the six members of her initial leadership team at Wyeth, she says, was a returned emigrant - science graduates who went abroad because there were no jobs in Ireland. While away, each had notched up the experience that would eventually make them all highly valued employees back home.

Hanly, now 38 and director of quality control at the new biotechnology facility, has found herself working at Wyeth with four other members of her class of 20 at the University of Ulster - three of whom also had gone to jobs in the United States and brought those skills back to Ireland once the economy shifted for the better.

Damian Halloran, 43, divisional vice president of operations at Abbott Vascular in Clonmel, County Tipperary, had a similar experience. Though his two decades at the company began at a manufacturing plant in Sligo, he eventually went to the United States because of the better job opportunities. He spent a few years in New Orleans running Abbott's US export operations, and then headed to headquarters in Chicago, running global supply chain operations.

Three years ago, he came back to Ireland. What did he gain from being abroad? "The overall understanding of how the business works. I wouldn't have acquired that in Ireland. If you're not exposed first hand, it's hard to teach it," he says.

For Halloran, family ties were a strong influence. "There is a crossroads, where career meets personal life." He had small children, and he and his wife imagined them back seeing their grandparents each week, attending Irish schools. He thinks the Irish in general find it hard to totally cut their ties to home. "It's funny, but Irish people even now will say they are going 'on assignment' when they leave, not that they are emigrating," he notes.

Given this, many observers now wonder whether Ireland's stable economy and the easy availability of Irish-based life sciences jobs means fewer people will go abroad and get that wider international experience that has helped feed the sector's growth. "If people don't go abroad, they don't develop their own network," Prosser says.

Ironically, that may be tomorrow's challenge: ensuring Ireland's biosciences graduates get the rich experience that once came through forced job exile. Perhaps similar experience could be gained in large companies that send employees abroad for international experience. That's definitely an option many Irish graduates will prefer to the dire situation of their predecessors who said goodbye, never knowing if they'd be back. Today's graduates are most likely to get their initial taste of international work by taking a year off to travel and do a mixed bag of service industry jobs as they backpack around the globe, says Hanly.

"Back in my day, no one would risk that! We felt we had to get serious jobs right away or we might never get them," she says. "But now, there's a new confidence that's wonderful to see."

A Network of Networks

For Irish researchers at home and abroad, there are plenty of groups and organizations to help make the most of connections.

BioConnect Ireland

Established in 2001, BioConnect Ireland is an informal networking organization for people in the biotechnology, life science, and medical device sectors across the whole island of Ireland. It brings together academia, industry, government agencies, trade, professional services, and financial organizations at several networking events each year.
www.biotechnologyireland.com/bioconnect
Contact: Jim Ryan, jim.ryan@circa.ie

BioLink USA-Ireland

Formed in 2003, BioLink USA -Ireland is comprised of scientists and others from Ireland working in the US biotechnology and life sciences fields. The group helps foster community, networking, collaboration and professional development among expatriates in the Irish biotechnology community and anyone else interested in supporting those aims. BioLink has nine chapters in cities across the US and regularly holds events for members. BioLink and FÁS, the Irish Training Authority, collaborate to place Irish graduates in science and engineering interning for six months in top US institutions, working with researchers in biomedicine and nanotechnology.
www.biolinkusaireland.org
Contact: John Monahan, monahan@vitasoft.org

Enterprise Ireland

The government agency responsible for developing and promoting the Irish business sector, Enterprise Ireland, is based in Dublin and has many international offices, including four in the United States: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and in Palo Alto, Calif. (Silicon Valley). The agency helps Irish companies with export sales, investing in research, productivity, starting up and scaling up, and driving regional enterprise. Enterprise Ireland will also help international companies source Irish suppliers. It runs the BioTechnology Ireland Web site, with information for and on the biotech sector.
www.enterprise-ireland.com
www.biotechnologyireland.com

ExpertiseIreland

ExpertiseIreland is a Web portal with a searchable database of ideas and technologies emerging from Irish third-level institutions across the entire island of Ireland. www.expertiseireland.com

IDA Ireland

The Industrial Development Agency (IDA ) is the Irish government organization responsible for promoting overseas investment into the Republic of Ireland and encouraging the expansion of existing investments. It operates American offices in, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and in Mountain View, Calif. www.idaireland.com Contact: Enda Connolly, enda.connolly@ida.ie

InterTradeIreland

InterTradeIreland is a cross-border trade and development body based in Newry, County Down, in Northern Ireland. The organization helps companies develop their business on an all-island basis, by promoting networking and partnerships between individuals and businesses, running regular events, and offering financial support to underfunded projects. www.intertradeireland.com Contact: info@intertradeireland.com

Invest Northern Ireland

Invest Northern Ireland fills the roles of its southern counterparts, Enterprise Ireland and the Industrial Development Agency, by promoting multinational investment and the growth of indigenous companies in Northern Ireland. It has offices in Boston, New York, Denver, and in San Jose, Calif. www.investni.com Contact: Donal Durkan, donal.durkan@investni.com

Irish BioIndustry Association(IBIA)

With more than 50 member companies, the IBIA is the main representative body for the biotechnology industry in the Republic of Ireland. It promotes the development and growth of the multinational and indigenous biotech sector and works with the government and others. www.ibec.ie/ibia Contact: Michael Gillen, michael.gillen@ibec.ie

Science Foundation Ireland

Science Foundation Ireland oversees a €1.4billion budget for investment in research and development in biotechnologies, and information and communications technologies. Its Life Sciences Directorate is the division that supports research in bioengineering, biological sciences, and other sciences underpinning biotechnology. www.sfi.ie Contact: Alva O'Cleirigh, alva.ocleirigh@sfi.ie