Arizona leaders need to defend growing bioscience industry

More than 3,000 companies in Arizona have created over 40,000 jobs in the bioscience fields, which has led to a positive economic impact of nearly $44 billion. These are the types of good-paying jobs — many paying $20,000 higher than the private sector average — that attract the highly educated, productive workers that states clamor for. Arizona’s contribution to the bioscience sector has changed patients’ lives for the better and made our economy stronger. A new proposal from Washington, though, takes a page from Europe and could reverse the progress scientists and researchers here have achieved, leaving our medical treatments, therapies and the economy worse off. Consider the example of one of Arizona’s shining stars, TGen, the Translational Genomics Research Institute. Created in 2002,