The Innovation Trail Audio Guide is a production of The Innovation Trail of Greater Boston, a grassroots nonprofit based in Boston. To learn more about the Trail, visit theinnovationtrail.org. If you enjoyed this audio guide, please consider making a donation to The Innovation Trail to help support our outreach initiatives — especially to schools in the Boston area.

The co-founders of the Innovation Trail are Scott Kirsner and Bob Krim. The executive director is Anna Dunbar.

The narrator for the audio guide is Carmichael Roberts, founder and managing partner at the Boston-based venture capital firm Material Impact.

Wade Roush wrote and produced the guide, with editing from Scott Kirsner. The music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

The guide was created with help from a grant from MeetBoston, a visitor services organization promoting tourism, meetings, and conventions in Boston and Cambridge.

Special thanks to:

Bob Krim

Ron Robinson

Shervone Neckles

Luci Marzola

Jim Utterback

Gavin Kleespies

Jazz Dottin

Rosalyn Elder

Charlotte Gray

John Herman

Sarah Alger

Tim Rowe

Bill Aulet

John Durant

Tali Sasson

Rich Miner

Debbie Douglas

Namrata Sengupta

Ruth Lehmann

Phillip Sharp

Walter Gilbert

Tom Leighton

Julia Austin

Peter Kachmar

Noubar Afeyan

Victor McElheny

Susan Benjamin

810 Main Street, Cambridge 

In the early 20th century, this stretch of Main Street and nearby Massachusetts Avenue was home to so many candy companies that the neighborhood was affectionately known as Confectioner’s Row; the factories employed thousands of people and filled the air with a chocolatey aroma. The big white building at 810 Main Street is the last relic of that era. It houses a subsidiary of Tootsie Roll Industries known as Cambridge Brands, maker of beloved candies such as Junior Mints and Charleston Chews.

Look for a mural across the street from 810 Main, toward Toscanini's Ice Cream and Central Square, that tells the story of candy manufacturing in Cambridge.

If you are starting the tour at this stop, please refer to our website for Google Maps that can help guide you from place to place. 

Guest speaker

Susan Benjamin, Founder, True Treats Candy, Harper’s Ferry, WV; author, Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America’s Favorite Pleasure (2016)

700 Main Street, Cambridge

This is one of the most storied sites in Cambridge’s industrial history—a nexus for advances in everything from railroad car manufacturing to telephony to photography to biotechnology. Our audio guide focuses on just one of 700 Main Street’s tenants, Edwin Land and his company Polaroid. Working in this building in the 1940s, Land and other engineers and scientists at Polaroid figured out how to, in essence, build an entire darkroom’s worth of chemistry into a multilayered photographic medium. The first black-and-white Polaroid instant camera went on sale in 1948 and was a massive success, ultimately leading to a color version in 1972. For decades, Polaroid was one of the dominant employers in Cambridge, only to decline into bankruptcy after the development of competing technologies such as one-hour film processing, videotape camcorders, and digital cameras.

During business hours Mon-Fri, the LabCentral lobby at the back of the building is open to the public and includes a display about the building's history. When facing the building, walk down the sidewalk on the left side. Restrooms are also available.

Guest speaker

Victor McElheny, Founding Director, MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program; author, Insisting on the Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land (1998)

200 Technology Square, Cambridge 

While Moderna gained fame as one of the pharmaceutical companies that created mRNA vaccines against the COVID-19 virus in 2020, it has actually been working on mRNA therapies for a variety of health problems since 2010. The basic idea behind all of the company’s treatments is to use messenger RNA to carry coding sequences into human cells, where the cells’ own machinery follows the code to build the desired therapeutic antibodies or other proteins. The pandemic gave Moderna the opportunity to test this approach in tens thousands of test subjects and then make billions of FDA-approved vaccine doses, vastly accelerating the company’s programs. “We never anticipated this kind of an exponential increase in the possibilities,” says Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s co-founder and chairman.

Guest speaker

Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO, Flagship Pioneering; Co-founder and Chairman, Moderna Pharmaceuticals

555 Technology Square, Cambridge

Charles Stark Draper founded the Aeronautical Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT in 1932, and in 1973 the lab was spun out independent nonprofit under Draper’s name. For eight decades, it has played a pivotal role in the development of guidance and control systems for aircraft, spacecraft, and missiles—but its most famous exploit by far was the creation of the Apollo guidance system that helped American astronauts fly to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s. A giant model of the moon hanging in the company’s atrium commemorates the 50th anniversary of that accomplishment.

Guest speaker

Peter Kachmar, Systems Engineer, Draper Laboratory

145 Broadway, Cambridge

If you started using the web in the 1990s, you may remember the “World Wide Wait,” the long loading times that plagued popular websites. Akamai, a spinout from MIT’s Lab for Computer Science and mathematics department, solved the network congestion problem by developing algorithms for distributed computing and building its own network of edge servers that could store copies of high-demand content closer to users. Even today, Akamai sends streaming video and other content to billions of people each day—and in its iconic new building at 145 Broadway, it remains one of Kendall Square’s anchor technology companies.

Guest speakers

Tom Leighton, Co-founder and CEO, Akamai

Julia Austin, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School; former VP of Engineering, Akamai

115 Broadway, Cambridge

Biogen, founded in 1978, was the first biotechnology company in Cambridge, and in many ways, it created the mold for the life science businesses that dominate Kendall Square to this day. The company exploits fundamental insights into gene and protein expression to design monoclonal antibodies and other medicines for the treatment of neurological and neuromuscular diseases, hematologic diseases, and cancer. Its Cambridge campus includes this facility at 115 Broadway as well as its world headquarters office at 225 Binney Street. 

Guest speakers

Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor emeritus, Department of Biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Co-founder, Biogen; Nobel Prize winner, 1993

Walter Gilbert, Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University; Co-founder, Biogen; Nobel Prize winner, 1980

455 Main Street, Cambridge

The Whitehead Institute, founded in 1982, was the first of a cluster of nonprofit life sciences research institutes located along Main Street in Cambridge, all affiliated with (but operating independently from) big local universities such as MIT and Harvard. It’s most famous as the leading contributor to the Human Genome Project; researchers at the Whitehead sequenced about one-third of the DNA included in the “rough draft” of the genome finished in 2000. Today the Whitehead continues to be a leading generator of fundamental research publications and advances in molecular biology and genetics. It’s especially well known for its Fellows Program, which boosts the careers of promising young investigators.

Guest speaker

Ruth Lehmann, President and Director, Whitehead Institute; Professor, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

415 Main Street, Cambridge

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is an independent, nonprofit research center established in 2004 to investigate the applications of genomics to human health. In the Discovery Center, facing Main Street, the institute shares exhibits designed to explain the technologies researchers at the Broad and its partner institutions are developing and the new treatments they’re exploring in areas such as cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, and psychiatric conditions. For example, the Broad played a crucial role during the Covid-19 pandemic, partnering with MIT, the City of Cambridge, and other organizations to use Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase PCR diagnostic assays to test more than 37 million nasal swab samples for the SARS-CoV-2 virus; one exhibit in the Discovery Center tells that story, with help from a video interview with Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui.

Guest speaker

Namrata Sengupta, Associate Director of Scientific Public Engagement and Broad Discovery Center, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

The Stata Center, designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry, opened in 2004 as the home for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as the school’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and several other labs and departments. It’s designed around a wide first-floor “Student Street” featuring art, chalkboards, eating places, and displays honoring famous student hacks from MIT’s past. The space includes exhibits celebrating Building 20, a large structure built on this same site during World War II that was intended to be temporary but was actually occupied for nearly six decades. The shabby but infinitely flexible building housed the Radiation Laboratory, the secret lab that developed radar systems for the war; later it became a warren of small labs, programs, and organizations such as the Tech Model Railroad Club, which counted many early computer innovators among its members.

Go in and explore the first floor, grab a snack at the café, or sit down in the Stata Center as you listen to this segment. There are also restrooms inside.

Guest speaker

Debbie Douglas, Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum