In the Globe, Steve Bailey tells the story of Stephen Wong, a former Harvard medical scientist who recently decamped to Houston because he got a "an offer he couldn't refuse."

In a star economy, it is stars like Wong we are counting on to again reinvent New England's future. And now Wong is telling us that the old rules no longer apply, that Boston no longer has some inherent intellectual lock over places like Houston. Or two-score cities around the globe for that matter.

...Houston is very hot, Wong says. But it has its advantages. It is newer, he says, with more collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston. "It seems they need me much more than Harvard did," he says.

More collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston....

Drew Faust has spoken about the need for collaboration across boundaries at Harvard, and she's clearly right. This is a significant problem. What many folks at Harvard seem not to want to admit, though, is that the problem is not just structural, fixable with calendar reform and so on. It's cultural. Competition exists much more comfortably at Harvard than cooperation.

If Faust manages to diminish the culture of cutthroat competition and the death grip of secrecy that pervade Harvard, she will really have accomplished something.....