Biotech Innovation Hub
A working biology lab integrated with the neighborhood park, treating the site's contamination history as an educational and research asset.
About this proposal
The Biotech Innovation Hub proposes an operational biology lab on the site with public viewing areas, educational programming, and partnerships with nearby community health organizations. The lab is not hidden behind institutional walls. The neighborhood walks by it. Students tour it. The people who work there live nearby. The park above and around the lab stays free, open, and civic in character — the hub does not privatize the parcel.
East Cambridge already sits inside one of the densest biotech corridors in the world. That density has rarely translated into street-level community programming in the same neighborhoods whose soil tells the story of heavy industry. This proposal is an attempt to change that — to put a small, community-facing biology lab where local schoolchildren can walk in and see someone running a soil sample through a mass spectrometer. The contamination history is not a liability to hide. It is a teaching material.
The draft coalition letter attached to this proposal asks Cambridge City Council to engage with the campaign and a to-be-named biology partner to scope a community-facing hub as part of the post-excavation use of the site. The ask is scoping, not approval of a specific operator. No operator is named in the letter. The question it puts in front of the Council is whether a working neighborhood lab belongs in the post-remediation plan at all — and 500 signatures is what makes that question unignorable.
The coalition letter
Draft · 400 words · Updated April 14, 2026
This is what gets sent to Cambridge City Council if 500 neighbors sign. You are not endorsing every sentence — you are saying the structural ask is one you stand behind. Signers can suggest edits before delivery.
Dear Cambridge City Council,
We write as East Cambridge neighbors who have followed the contamination and remediation planning at Gold Star Mothers Park. We recognize the work that the Department of Public Works, MassDEP, and the EPA have devoted to the remediation design, and we appreciate the quality of public communication around a technically complex process.
The presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, lead, and benzo(a)pyrene at concentrations far above RCS-1 screening thresholds — 68×, 41×, and 175× respectively — makes clear that this site carries decades of industrial history in its soil. We believe that history, once honestly reckoned with through the remediation process, becomes the foundation for a particularly meaningful use of this land.
East Cambridge sits at the intersection of the world’s most concentrated biomedical research district and some of the commonwealth’s most densely populated residential neighborhoods. The residents of this neighborhood live within walking distance of MIT, the Broad Institute, and dozens of research institutions, yet almost none of the scientific work done in those buildings is accessible to the neighbors who share the same zip code. That gap is not inevitable.
The structural proposal we are advancing is a working biology laboratory on the remediated site, co-located with community-serving open space and paired with educational programming open to residents of all ages. The facility we envision is not a commercial laboratory and not a university annex. It is a civic science space — a place where neighborhood residents, school-aged students, and working researchers can share the same bench and, over time, a common understanding of the biological and environmental questions that matter to this community.
We are not asking the Council to fund a building or commission a design. We are asking the Council to include a science and education facility in the preferred-use analysis for this site and to invite institutions in the Kendall Square corridor to participate in a feasibility conversation. Cambridge has brokered complex public-private arrangements before. This site, with its visibility, its history, and its proximity to both a residential community and a research cluster, warrants that kind of deliberate planning.
The remediation creates a clean slate. What the Council decides to authorize on that slate will define this corner of East Cambridge for the next two generations.
Respectfully submitted,
Tim Miano, organizer, Santa Prosper LLC — on behalf of [X] neighbors in East Cambridge.
Sign a conditional commitment
I, ___, support Biotech Innovation Hub if at least 500 other Cambridge residents do too. I understand my signature will appear on a coalition letter to Cambridge City Council if the threshold is reached.