Hotbeds for Scientific Vision

Governors across the nation are beefing up their university research and development budgets, sparked in part by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s recent observation that such investments could help cushion state economies from recessionary blows.

Gov. Gray Davis’ decision this month to approve $300 million to create three new University of California Institutes for Science and Innovation represents the latest such investment. The institutes deserve praise for their scientific and entrepreneurial vision; only days old, they already have raised more than $700 million from the private sector--a level of matching money unusual in public research. More important, they will be investing in basic research for promising but underfunded fields.

Nearly all state-based R&D; expansions have focused on biotechnology. An example: Earlier this year Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G. Thompson asked legislators to appropriate $317 million to build a complex of biotechnology research centers. Holding up a vial containing a strand of DNA, Thompson said “the face of our future economy lies in this little tube and many others like it in laboratories across Wisconsin.”

Since biotech already plays a big role in California’s economy--private universities invested heavily in the field in the 1990s--the challenge for Davis was to be more innovative, and he has succeeded. UC San Diego and UC Irvine will advance a wireless Internet; UCLA and UC Santa Barbara will explore nanotechnology, the art of building tiny structures one atom at a time, and UC San Francisco, in collaboration with UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, will develop new ways to fight disease by combining engineering, physics and other scientific disciplines with medical research.

Davis’ plan will need careful oversight to prevent taxpayer dollars from producing glorified tax breaks that subsidize corporate R&D.; Officials should also ensure that the institutes do not shroud their scientific progress in secrecy--a practice that, while common in the private sector, is contrary to the University of California’s historical emphasis on the free and open exchange of information.

The institutes will seek to demolish walls between scientific disciplines and thereby improve academic culture. Similarly, there should be no walls between the institutes and the public eye.