Davis Awards Science Funds

Calling it the state’s “most ambitious scientific research initiative,” Gov. Gray Davis on Thursday awarded $300 million in tax dollars to three new University of California institutes-- including one based at UCLA--that will explore the frontiers of science and technology.

Davis, who required that the institutes leverage each tax dollar with $2 in private investments, said his goal is to “duplicate the rich collaboration between academia and industry that led to the Silicon Valley.”

High-tech and biotech industries have radically restructured the state’s economy, helping pull California out of a recession and infusing it with high-paying jobs in businesses that would have sounded like science fiction a mere decade ago.

“Who knows what breakthroughs will come?” Davis said. “We believe that these three institutes will invest in the 21st century and create the same dividends that Stanford Research Institute and Stanford did when it helped spawn the Silicon Valley.”

Picking from six finalists in a spirited competition, Davis selected joint proposals from UC San Diego and UC Irvine to advance a “wireless” Internet and from UCLA and UC Santa Barbara to explore nanotechnology--the art of building tiny structures an atom at a time. The third he picked was from UC San Francisco, in collaboration with UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, to develop new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease by combining engineering, physics and other scientific disciplines with medical research.

Davis made his picks by following the recommendations of a blue-ribbon panel of experts that included the president of Scripps Research Institute, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the president of Stanford.

The panel was also intrigued by a fourth proposal--by Berkeley--to fortify the state’s patchwork quilt of communications so it could stand up to earthquakes or other natural disasters.

Acting upon the panel’s suggestion, the governor said he will ask the Legislature to commit to an additional $100 million to fund the proposed Center for Information Technology Research, which Berkeley hopes to launch in collaboration with UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and a yet-to-be-built 10th UC campus near Merced.

Davis said he will ask the Legislature to follow the same funding formula as for each of the other institutes: $25 million a year for four years to construct buildings and laboratories. Each of the three winners has, in turn, lined up pledges of $250 million or more from private industry, individual donors or federal grants.

As recommended by the panel, Davis rejected two other proposals: UC Irvine’s Institute of Systems Biology, and UC Riverside’s Institute in Agricultural Genomics.

The awards give a huge boost to UC efforts to join the rush of research universities into promising cross-disciplinary fields.

Stanford launched its Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences last year with a $150-million donation from Netscape co-founder Jim Clark. Caltech has a similar, but smaller, initiative.

Davis said he expects other states to follow California’s lead, especially since Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently urged members of the National Governors Assn. to invest in their research universities if they wanted their states to profit from the new economy.

Already, the UC’s systemwide office has received inquiries from other states with major universities--Massachusetts, Connecticut and Michigan--interested in the new collaboration between the state government and the university, said UC President Richard C. Atkinson.

With most of the state tax dollars being used to construct campus buildings and laboratories and get them started, much of the operating money will come from partnerships with high-tech companies.

UC San Diego’s Institute of Communications and Information Technology has lined up financial commitments from Applied Micro Circuits, Qualcomm, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The corporate sponsors of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute include Hewlett-Packard and Cree Inc. and talks continue with Intel, Applied Materials Inc. and Broadcom, officials said.

“Our corporate partners are interested in what we do,” said Roberto Peccei, UCLA vice chancellor for research. “If we are successful, this institute will be the basis of the next big industry.”

A decade ago, such cozy relations between the ivory tower and industry set off alarm bells. Some critics still warn that profit motives could distort lab results or discourage researchers from sharing information that might prove to be lucrative.

“There are dangers--no one can deny that,” Atkinson said. “But we will institute policies and procedures to protect the vital interests of the public. There will be cases where we will be embarrassed because a faculty member will violate our policies, but our polices will be clear.”

Such worries have been waning, particularly as patents from profitable ventures have become an important source of revenue. Last year, for instance, UC earned $88.9 million from patent royalties.

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Research of the Future

Here are the three winning UC Institutes for Science and Innovation, which will each receive $100 million in tax dollars over the next four years.

California NanoSystems Institute

Lead Campus: UCLA

Cooperating campus: UC Santa Barbara

Non-tax dollars: $253.9 million

Concept: Working on the scale of a nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, the institute plans to engineer new materials, atom by atom, that will have wide-ranging uses. Plans include developing a new generation of light bulbs that use one-tenth the energy of conventional ones and never burn out, computer switches the size of molecules, materials to build cars that are stronger than steel but lighter than plastic, and medicines that target molecular mistakes that cause disease.

California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology

Lead campus: UC San Diego

Cooperating campus: UC Irvine

Non-tax dollars: $257.4 million

Concept: The institute plans to develop a new generation of wireless Internet that would have wide uses in medicine and daily life. Among other things, it hopes to develop sensors that would allow doctors to monitor the well-being of heart patients around the clock, or make house calls through telecommunications. It wants to develop sensors to create “smart” bridges and roadways that could self-report earthquake damage undetectable to the human eye.

California Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedicine

Lead campus: UC San Francisco

Cooperating campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz

Non-tax dollars: $242.9 million

Concept: By integrating mathematics, physics, chemistry and engineering with biomedical research, the institute hopes to attack medical problems that have been unapproachable. It will seek a deeper understanding of biology--from atoms to organs--and aims to develop artificial tissue to replace everything from blood vessels to bones. “This is going to be the next step in the biological revolution,” said UC President Richard C. Atkinson.