BioForward Helps Candidates Connect With Business
Posted: April 03, 2010 - 12:00 PM
Elections for state government and Congress won't be held until Nov. 2, but already in March there were several business sweeps by the contenders.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democratic candidate for governor, hit Monroe Street's business district March 9, meeting with shop owners, employees and customers.
The day after Republican Wall aired his views to employees of Mead & Hunt, Barrett stopped at Lucigen, a Middleton company that makes biological tools for life science research and gene cloning.
Lucigen President Jeff Williams said Barrett had contacted BioForward, the lobbying association for Wisconsin's biotechnology industry, asking to arrange a visit to a small biotech company to learn more about it. He spent two and a half hours touring the company — a lot longer than expected.
"He was very impressive, from our standpoint," Williams said. "He asked a lot of questions about the business, and our business in particular, and seemed to be genuinely fascinated by the type of things we were doing here."
Barrett also met privately with Lucigen chief executive David Mead rather than holding an open forum with the company's 25 full-time employees.
"There was sort of an understanding that it wasn't going to be political," Williams said. "We're hoping that if he should become governor, he will have a better awareness of what we're doing in the biotechnology arena, that it does create real jobs."
This is a section of an article that appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal on April 3, 2010. Click Here to read the entire article.
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