New Council Seeks to Bring Science Projects to State
A newly formed council of scientists and businessmen based in Irvine will try to answer a question that has been brewing in California research circles for the past few years:
In light of the state’s string of losing bids on research projects--including an atom smasher that is being built near Dallas and an earthquake center that the federal government decided to locate in Buffalo, N.Y.--is California’s high-tech and research community doing something wrong?
The California Council on Science and Technology, a 21-member council of the state’s scientific and business elite, will be based at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering next to the UC Irvine campus. It will be funded by five public and private universities.
Besides examining what may have gone wrong in the past, the council is seeking ways to better position California researchers for scientific projects likely to be funded over the next decade. They range from mapping genetic components of diseases to monitoring the ozone layer.
“California seemed to be losing a great deal of the high-visibility projects,” said Edward A. Frieman, a member of the council and director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “California being the most populous state and (having been) in a major position of leadership, the real question is, has that position of leadership eroded?”
A decade ago, California was home to a fifth of the country’s scientists and half of the nationally sponsored research and development grants, according to California research groups. Then in the mid-1980s, the state suffered a series of setbacks.
In late 1987, California bid and lost on Sematech, a microelectronics research consortium. The $1.5-billion project, sponsored by 14 companies including IBM, was awarded to Austin, Tex. A few months later, California lost out to Texas again when the federal Department of Energy decided to base the Superconducting Super Collider, a $6-billion atom-smasher, there.
The ultimate snub had come more than a year earlier. In 1986, the National Science Foundation picked the State University of New York at Buffalo for the site of a new $25-million earthquake research center, rejecting an application from UC Berkeley.
The Science and Technology Council will examine ways to coordinate scientific research and better position California universities and institutes vying for future projects, said UCI Prof. F. Sherwood Rowland.
