Biotechnology, telecommunications and the emerging field of nanotechnology have become leaders in the economic development of North County and our region. It's a clean, high-paying, fast-growing cluster of industries that are spinning off jobs and drawing investment by the tens of millions. It's a result of hard work and a bit of luck.

The high-tech workers, researchers and business specialists are doing the work. It's the job of the public policy makers to keep the region so attractive that our luck continues.

Consider: If Irwin Jacobs had not come to UC San Diego a generation ago, he would have founded Qualcomm somewhere else. Two other UCSD faculty members, Ivor Royston and Howard Birndorf, founded San Diego's first biotech company, Hybritech. Birndorf and biochemist Michael Heller later found another local biotech firm, Nanogen. Had these few people gone elsewhere, so would their companies.

In that case, Qualcomm's 5,000 local employees would be living and working somewhere else. So would the more than 20 companies that do research and manufacturing for Qualcomm's CDMA wireless technology. These companies employ even more local workers than Qualcomm. And our region's leading biotech company today, Invitrogen, would employ its 1,000 people somewhere other than Carlsbad.

The question for public policy makers is this: How do we support the local growth of biotechnology and nanotechnology to keep these firms here and draw more of them?

The answer is obvious: We keep the region attractive enough to make people want to live here, and we provide our residents with the best education there is, from the ground up. The world-class engineering school at UCSD is a magnet for young biotechnologists, and when they graduate they can stay here and work here. But CEOs in this cluster of industries have said repeatedly that our area is not educating enough people well enough to fill the jobs in their industry.

We want those jobs to go to the children of North County, not to engineers imported from overseas on special visas because we are not producing enough engineers and scientists.

Now a new group, NanoBioNexus, has formed to try to combine the research of our local biotech industry with nanotechnology, which attempts to diagnose and treat diseases with atomic-level precision. Nano-biotechnologists design drugs and drug-delivery systems so precisely that diseases such as cancer could be treated without the debilitating side effects of systemic chemotherapy.

The field has obvious and immediate applications in the detection and possible treatment of bioterrorism. One Carlsbad company, Isis Pharmaceuticals, already has been awarded a $19.5 million federal contract to develop biosensors for bacteria and viruses.

This is an industry with the potential for explosive growth, and it's the sort of industry that every region wants. We've got it already. Our policy makers, political leaders and all of us must do everything we can to keep it. That means supporting our schools and it also will require improving our region's transportation network so we don't drive those highly paid high-tech workers away because it's such a pain in the neck to get to and from work.