High-Wire Act for Science

Late last year, the high-tech industry executives on Gray Davis’ newly created Council on Bioscience warned the governor that the state was not training enough people and conducting enough long-term, basic research to move their industries forward.

They pointed out that California, which received half of all the nation’s private-sector investments in biotechnology research in 1995, received only 33% in 1998, largely because of the flight of capital to states and nations with more graduate students in science and with greater willingness to build public-private partnerships.

Last week, Davis responded, budgeting $225 million to create three Institutes for Science and Innovation. These would be partnerships of the University of California and private industry to explore future technologies that the private sector, preoccupied with improving current products, cannot or will not pioneer on its own.

The governor is working out the details of how the institutes will be established. He should ensure that they create a fresh academic model that razes the constraining walls of traditional disciplines so scientists from disparate fields can work together on fundamental problems.

Even UC officials are thinking too narrowly with their suggestion that one institute focus on life sciences and medicine, another on engineering and physical sciences, a third on agriculture and environmental science. Geneticists, whom most universities group in life sciences, are becoming essential partners for computer scientists trying to develop DNA microchips, as well as for agricultural bioengineers who are designing genetically engineered crops. The fewer walls the better.

The governor’s proposal requires each institute to attract at least $25 million a year in industry funding. That shouldn’t be a problem. Last year, for instance, UC San Diego partly matched its $283 million in state funding with $105 million in private grants.

More challenging will be the task of ensuring that private investments don’t end up pressuring UC researchers to conduct only research focused on marketable inventions. Such pressures have been growing since Congress passed the Stevenson-Wydler Innovation Act and the Bayh-Dole Act in the 1980s, bills that allowed universities to develop and seek patents in their own names. Davis should ensure that researchers are protected from financial pressures, for science history shows that many discoveries we value today came from scientists stumbling on practical applications in pursuit of larger understanding.

Last year, for instance, Rockefeller University’s Guenter Blobel and Caltech’s Ahmed H. Zewail were awarded Nobel prizes for practical discoveries in medicine and chemistry. Both scientists emphasized that they had made their discoveries not by trying to develop profitable inventions but by asking fundamental questions in an effort to comprehend nature.

Balancing the conflict between investors and researchers will be a difficult high-wire act. But if Davis sets the right balance, he can keep California in the high-tech lead.