Albany

Imagine upstate New York as the new Cambridge, Mass.

That's what Robert Langer, an Albany native and one of the world's most influential pharmaceutical inventors, said Monday at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering during an event touting Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Tax-Free New York plan.

"I hope what happened in Boston and Palo Alto will happen here," said Langer, a top Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who revolutionized the way cancer drugs work and helped create 25 biotech start-ups. "It would be a dream of mine."

Cuomo wants to make nearly all SUNY campuses in the state tax-free zones where companies would be able to operate without having to pay property, income or other state taxes.

Only a few years ago, such a proposal would have been unthinkable because state law prohibited businesses from operating on SUNY campuses.

Cuomo said Monday that his plan "levels the playing field overnight" for upstate communities trying to retain — or attract — start-up companies.

"There are winners and there are losers," Cuomo said. "And the point of this is to be a winner."

In a dose of politically potent criticism from the right, the Conservative Party on Monday denounced the university-anchored, tax-free zones.

In a memo delivered to legislators, Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long wrote, "As we have noted many times, government should not be deciding what business receives government handouts that give them advantages over other businesses."

Although details of the governor's initiative have been slow to emerge, it is clear that Cuomo designed Tax-Free New York to take advantage of the job creation power of the SUNY system and private upstate schools like Cornell University that have a harder time keeping graduates compared to places like MIT and Stanford.

Cuomo said as lucrative as they may sound, tax-free zones won't work without a dramatic "culture shift" in the SUNY system, which only recently began allowing companies to locate on school property under reforms made under Chancellor Nancy Zimpher. The zones are supposed to help replicate the success of the NanoCollege, which created a nonprofit entity to get around that former rule and bring companies like IBM and Tokyo Electron onto its campus.

Cuomo said perhaps the hardest task would fall onto SUNY college professors, who he says will be responsible for identifying promising start-ups coming out of their labs and convincing them to stay on campus after they graduate.

"This represents change," Cuomo said, speaking of SUNY professors. "(They) should get interested and participate in entrepreneurial activities. It's new, but it works."

In the SUNY system, the "model" of this new type of professor is Alain Kaloyeros, CEO of the NanoCollege, who was hired during the Gov. Mario Cuomo administration out of graduate school and built the NanoCollege into a $17 billion commercial research powerhouse for the computer chip industry.

"Great academic, Alain Kaloyeros," Cuomo said. "Great entrepreneur also. You can excel at both."

Langer, who attended The Milne School in Albany before getting his undergraduate degree from Cornell, said when he arrived at MIT in the 1970s for his graduate studies, the area around MIT looked like a slum.

But today, with the explosion of the pharmaceutical industry, Cambridge has become a business and cultural hub rivaling the city of Boston, attracting companies like Google and Microsoft as well.

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"That's what the governor imagines for New York state," Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy said.

lrulison@timesunion.com • 518-454-5504 • @larryrulison