With Its New Lab, Caltech Has a Formula to Survive Uncertainty
The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena dedicated a new laboratory Tuesday that places Southern California at a leading edge of computing and communications, signals a new dynamism for one of this region’s key institutions and points up a critical shift for basic research in the United States.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering will be a world-leading center for developing “electronic systems inspired by biology,” says Rod Goodman, director of neuromorphic systems engineering.
He means computers that “have human-like vision, hearing, touch, smell.” The end products of the work at the Moore lab, even those that are predictable, could include collision-avoiding cars, semiconductors that truly conquer deafness and electronic “skin” that can propel itself through water like sharks and dolphins.
For Caltech--the school that contributed basic research to Southern California’s battle against air pollution and its knowledge of earthquakes, not to mention the development of modern physics and the U.S. space program--scientific challenges like the marriage of biology and computing are routine.
But the institute is facing financial challenges as government research budgets are threatened by cutbacks. At the same time, the fact that corporations everywhere are reducing basic research could spell opportunity for the school.
Caltech, which manages and staffs Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, gets $140 million of its $289-million annual budget from the government. It has avoided funding reductions so far, but “the instability worries us,” says Steve Koonin, provost, or chief operating officer, of the school.
And so, reacting to uncertainty, Caltech wants to increase its emphasis on collecting licensing fees for the inventions of its professors and on seeking more direct support from industrial companies that benefit from its transfers of technology.
The school’s famed seismology institute has begun the process, working with investments from industrial partners to develop a system capable of giving areas away from an epicenter a 15-second warning of earth tremors anywhere in Southern California.
Caltech, whose faculty members have won 23 Nobel Prizes over 70 years, traditionally transferred technology by placing graduates in industry--from the original leadership of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica in the 1930s to Gordon Moore, Caltech PhD in 1954, co-founder of Intel Corp. in 1968 and contributor of the $16.5-million grant that built the new laboratory.
It has also contributed mightily through the public spread of scientific knowledge. In 1950, Arie J. Haagen-Smit, a Caltech biochemist, discovered the deadly buildup of photochemical smog in Los Angeles and spent the next two decades campaigning for air quality. Caltech physicist Richard Feynman, who wrote the book on modern physics, identified the cause of the 1986 Challenger disaster and made possible succeeding and safer space voyages.
But through the decades, the institute was reluctant to be tightly connected to industry. In 1939, Caltech aerodynamicist Theodore Von Karman frowned on the school’s building wind tunnels for Southern California’s aircraft industry, because business usage would crowd out basic research.
In recent years, as faculty at Stanford and UC Berkeley were credited with spawning electronics and biotech companies, Caltech seemed curiously absent from mention among the venture capital start-ups.
Now the school aims to be more actively engaged, providing basic research for major companies that no longer do it themselves. “We’re not going to replace government funding with private contributions,” says David Goodstein, physics professor and vice provost. “But it will fill in around the edges.”
In fact, Caltech could provide a new model for industry-academe collaboration because of its size and its interdisciplinary approach to science. The school is surprisingly small--2,000 graduate and undergraduate students--but faculty-rich, with 1,000 full-time and visiting professors plus postdoctoral assistants.
And it has always stressed research across scientific lines. The school’s 5-year-old Beckman Institute combines research in chemistry, physics, biology and engineering.
Computer graphics research at Beckman, for example, creates programs in which computers take the next logical step--ultimately making molecular connections in which machines will manufacture themselves and new drugs create themselves. Beckman scholars are already working with pharmaceutical start-up companies in Pasadena.
And now the Moore lab, which links biology, computer science and engineering, will try to create machines that imitate the intricate actions of the human brain. The lab and its work grows out of the insights of Caltech professor Carver Mead, who saw in 1968 that the development of computing would not be in large machines or even small ones, but in millions of electrical conductors etched on silicon chips. He foresaw the microprocessor, the product and foundation stone of Intel.
Mead, now 61 and teaching at the Moore lab, also understood from his studies with Caltech physiologist and Nobelist Max Delbruck that for its ultimate development, computing would have to follow the action of neurons in the brain.
Thus, the Moore lab is working on vision systems in which cars can “see” and take a logical step to avoid collision, and on a skin of tiny semiconductor flaps that can respond independently to air pressure and reduce drag on airplane wings. Many other great leaps lie ahead.
It’s heady work at the frontier of computing and communications science. “There are many frontiers,” Mead says with a smile, “several of them here in this building.”
