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<p>Well, let’s be fair here. Neither the Bay Area nor Boston were true academic powerhouses in the world until WW2 or so. Let’s face it. Before WW2, the vast bulk of the best science research in the world was done in Europe. That’s why in the pre-war days, the vast majority of Nobels were won by Europeans - i.e. the Brits, Germans, Swiss, French, etc. </p>
<p>The point is, while sure, Boston and Harvard have long histories, most of that history they were not true academic powerhouses in any world-class sense. For more than 300 years after its founding, Harvard could not touch the research proclivity of schools like Oxford, Cambridge, or any of the other major European powerhouses. </p>
<p>The point is, while Boston may have, technically speaking, had a head-start over the Bay Area just because Boston was founded far earlier, Boston didn’t really do anything with that head start. It’s not like Boston was building up over time its research ability ever since its founding, and then the Bay Area just quickly caught up. The truth is, there was no region in the US that was truly world-class in science until WW2. It was events of the war and its aftermath that caused certain regions, the Bay Area and Boston being two of them, to establish world-class scientific credentials.</p>