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Fight for the Planet, made by Colin Carter, a 16-year-old student at Northern Secondary School on Mount Pleasant Rd., will premiere tonight at the MaRS Auditorium in downtown Toronto.

Michael J. Fox addresses the media and introduces his Parkinson's disease foundation at the MaRS Centre in Toronto Ont. on September 24, 2009. Each time University of Windsor graduate student Katie Facecchia sees actor Michael J. Fox on television, talking about his life-and-death battle with Parkinson's disease, she "can't help but think — just hang on, there'll be something soon."

This is Toronto's research district, a maze of concrete and glass where the finest minds collaborate, turning the city into a global centre of biomedical discovery.

Nine research institutes employing 5,000 university faculty members, 2,000 graduate students and 1,100 postdoctoral and clinical fellows lie within a 20-minute walk of each other. This biomedical cluster at the heart of Toronto is one of the largest on the continent, and is one of the 10 largest in the world.

Tom Hudson from Montreal; cell biologist Ben Neel from Boston; and stem-cell biologist Gordon Keller, who came to Toronto in 2006, just months after New York magazine named him one of the scientists that city could not afford to lose. Toronto is also home to Tak Mak, who discovered the "key to the immune system" T-cell receptor, and John Dick, who discovered the first cancer stem cell in 1994 and last year grew a human cancer in a lab mouse for the first time.

What is this creative economy? It is an economic system that relies most on ideas to serve as its major capital, instead of services or physical capital. Take Google for example. In an economy based on ideas, the potentialfor breakaway successes like Google is far greater.

According to Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure,Community and Everyday Life, members of the creative class are very different from those who are employed in the manufacturing, service or agriculture industries. They contribute to our economy primarily by producing the new forms and ideas exploited by our various industries and decision-makers.   What Florida terms the “super creative core” of this new class includes “scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designersand architects, as well as the ‘thought leadership’ of modern society: non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts and other opinion-makers.”

What sets a creative city apart from a non-creative city? Florida proposes that it is the “three Ts of economic development”: technology, talent and tolerance.