American life-sciences firms are moving labs downtown

From initialt impressions, the headquarters of Portal Innovations, a business in Chicago, resemble any other tech-firm office space. In the main lobby, workers in jeans and -shirts sip on fancy coffees and lounge around on modernist furniture. Walk around the place, however, and differences become apparent. First, there are almost no cubicles or desktop computers. Instead, the rooms surrounding the central atrium are filled with lab equipment: microscopes, mass spectrometers and bioreactors. Second, the space is in use. Given your correspondent visited late on a Thursday afternoon, the workers are rather numerous. Evidently almost nobody is working from home—probably because they do not have access to those bioreactors in their living rooms.Portal is a firm somewhere between a WeWork and a venture-capital incubator for life-sciences firms. Its tenants are startup firms typically trying to develop new drugs. The complex they are based in is Fulton Labs, in Chicago’s West Loop, which opened its second building last year. From the outside it resembles a fancy hotel, or any other new office building, with its gyms and balconies. But inside it is largely lab space. As well as Portal, space is taken up by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a charitable research lab set up by the Facebook founder, which opened in October. Its construction represents a bet that scientists will flock to city centres, even if office workers remain slow to return.