In an Era of Limits, UCI Still Thinks Big : * Ambitious Plans for Medical School Would Be Boon
UC Irvine never will be accused of thinking small--not even in a recession. In the depths of a troublesome economy, the university has gone public with long-range plans for a truly ambitious Center for the Health Sciences to supplement its existing medical school.
The implications for this planned development go far beyond the obvious potential to increase the stature of UC Irvine’s medical school. If UC Irvine can pull off this project, it will offer a major new resource and enterprise for Orange County as a center for clinical research in the 21st Century along the lines of the National Institutes of Health.
Nobody is counting this project as a sure bet in an environment of such uncertain financing. Gone are the days when the kind of federal dollars are available to do what NIH has done. And the center’s chief proponent, medical college dean Dr. Walter Henry, himself an NIH alumnus, acknowledges that a major part of the funding would have to come from the state, which in the summer of 1992 has been mired in unparalleled financial difficulties. Some faculty, in fact, facing cuts in their department budget of everything from travel to phones to paper clips, understandably may feel this is a really bad time even to be talking about such a project.
But the university cannot be faulted for looking ahead, and envisioning something on an imaginative scale. Bold-thinking UCI Chancellor Jack W. Peltason talks about “economic building in new industries--biomedical and communications” and of capitalizing on existing facilities and creating a major biomedical research center in Orange County.
Henry and Peltason have begun talking with prominent Orange County business and community leaders about this planned $450-million center. It is envisioned as a link to a planned biomedical industrial park that the university is trying to develop with medical and pharmaceutical companies on the edge of the campus.
This has the potential at least to create the kind of relationship between the university and industry that exists in the Boston and Cambridge areas around major universities, as is emerging in Seattle or like that between Stanford and the computer and electronic industry that created Silicon Valley. Indeed, the prospect for the potential economic benefits of biomedical research have not been lost on the Bush Administration, which reportedly has drafted plans which set priorities in government research efforts in this area.
UC Irvine’s new plan calls for five institutes tentatively identified as neuroscience, molecular genetics, cancer, cardiovascular and organ replacement. There also would be a clinical research center housing outpatient clinical research units.
Some may believe this is a pipe dream. But Peltason, as he often does, takes the long view. He says, “You build a university for the centuries, through the decades.”
Moreover, the idea of those treating patients near those doing basic research is exciting. And on the other side of these troubling economic times, there could be something very interesting going on here in Irvine, as a kind of new direction for the post-Cold War economy.
With all the obvious reservations, it make sense also that the regents want the financial woes of UCI Medical Center cleared up before they look to any big expansion of medical facilities.
But this is a proposal that takes a long view, when it is tempting to think only day to day in a recession. It should be welcomed for its fresh thinking and boldness, if nothing else.
