American life-sciences firms are moving labs downtown

From initial 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 t-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.