Science, State, Business Bond in a Nanosystem

UCLA and UC Santa Barbara are building a $350-million research institute with marching orders to keep California ahead in the next frontier of technology.

That frontier is the sub-visible world of atoms and molecules, in which the California Nanosystems Institute will try to discover how to harness the tiniest of particles to produce a range of incredible new products--such as fingertip-size supercomputers, molecular analyzers that identify diseased genes and thin plastic films with the strength of steel.

But the institute won’t be a high-tech ivory tower. The universities will work with scientists from California companies and from around the world. New companies and new kinds of businesses could emerge from the research this decade.

The institute, already operating on the two campuses, will break ground next year for three buildings--two at UCLA and one in Santa Barbara--to house researchers, teachers, students and scientists from industry.

“Nowhere else will the disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and enormous amounts of equipment be brought together,” says Philip Kuekes, a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard, which is backing the Nanosystems Institute with $5 million over the next four years.

Hewlett-Packard is not alone. About 20 other companies, including Sun Microsystems Inc., Amgen Inc., Intel Corp., Ericsson and Sequenom Inc., will contribute close to $50 million to the institute, mingling their money with $100 million from the state of California, $110 million from the federal government and about $90 million from private foundations.

That close cooperation of industry, government and universities represents a new approach to basic research just at a time when big companies are no longer pursuing long-term research--the kind that doesn’t demand a breakthrough product in three years.

“The idea is that the next generations of new enterprises that are science- and technology-based will come out of collaborations of the great research universities and government and the private sector,” says Albert Carnesale, chancellor of UCLA.

The institute’s director, Martha Krebs, describes its mission as a combination of basic research lab and business incubator.

“We have an obligation to develop knowledge of nano-phenomena, to train the people who will spread this knowledge and to strengthen existing companies and to create new ones,” says Krebs, a physicist who came to UCLA five months ago from the Department of Energy, where she managed advanced research programs.

What are nanosystems and why is there such a fuss about them? And what does UCLA-UCSB’s prominence in this new field mean for the economy of Southern California?

Nanosystems, in the words of one irreverent engineer, are “microscopic robotics.” The work involves creating new products and processes “from the bottom up” by working with chemistry and physics at the level of basic molecular structure, explained James Heath, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA and scientific co-director of the Nanosystems Institute.

Nano means a billionth part--a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Most cells in the human body are thousands of nanometers in size.

In nanosystems work, molecules are chemically manipulated to combine or take on altered properties. Heath offered the example of extraordinary lights that are being developed at UCSB and UCLA. “The everyday incandescent light bulb has an energy efficiency of only 3%,” he says, meaning it gives off as light only 3% of the electrical energy that goes into it. There is enormous waste heat. But with nano-methods, Heath says, the efficiency can get up to 55%. The light uses very little energy and never wears out.

The promise of nanosystems for the electronics industry is that, as current methods of etching circuitry onto silicon-based semiconductors reach their limits within this decade, “we will be able through chemistry to make molecular semiconductors,” says Hewlett-Packard’s Kuekes. The circuit capacity will be many times greater than anything possible today.

The federal government is definitely on board. President Bush hiked federal government funding of nano research to $485 million for fiscal 2002 from the $422 million that President Clinton had approved for this fiscal year.

At UCLA, scientists from Hewlett-Packard and other companies will work directly with Heath, helping to create the new electronics. Heath, who came to UCLA in 1994 from Rice University, hopes to build a molecular supercomputer with enormous capabilities that uses very little energy.

Sequenom, a small San Diego-based biotechnology company that originated in Hamburg, Germany, also will be participating in the Nanosystems Institute, says its chief executive, Antonius Schuh.

Sequenom screens genetic systems to determine predispositions to disease. In the short term, nanosystems would allow Sequenom to do more extensive genetic screenings at a lower cost, Schuh says.

In the long term, molecular remedies may be able to directly eliminate diseased genes in the body.

The possibilities are exciting, and California wants to make sure its present technology leadership continues. In addition to the Nanosystems Institute, the state is giving $100 million over four years to three other university groupings, the Telecommunications Institute at UC San Diego and UC Irvine; the Institute for Bioengineering at UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz; and the Information Technology Institute at Berkeley, UC Merced and UC Davis.

The model in the minds of Gov. Gray Davis and the legislators who authorized the institutes is Silicon Valley and its origins in the inspiration that Stanford University and professor Frederick Terman gave to the late William Hewlett and David Packard to set up their company in 1939.

The history of Silicon Valley and California’s rise to leadership of the world economy developed from collaborations of government research funds and the state’s universities, public and private.

And today’s efforts to ensure that future Silicon Valleys occur here are even more organized than in the past, says UCLA’s Carnesale, a nuclear engineer and university administrator who came to the Westwood campus four years ago from the No. 2 post at Harvard University.

“In other times, research funds were given to universities and you waited and hoped for the best,” Carnesale says.

“But in this effort we will have people from many disciplines working for a seamless transition from research to industry to jobs and profit.”

UCLA, the largest school in the UC system at 36,000 students, this year becomes the leading research university in the United States--edging out Harvard--as it receives more than $600 million in research funds from government agencies and private foundations.

Clearly, strong foundations for Southern California’s economic future are being laid down in Westwood, Santa Barbara and throughout this vast region.

*

James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Big Money for Small Research

The state and federal governments, aided by private and corporate donations, are bankrolling the Nanosystems Institute at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara. The word “nanosystems” refers to the technology of working with the tiniest molecules of matter to create thinking machines, cures for disease and other innovations.

State of California: $100 million

U.S. government: $110 million (from National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Defense Department)

Private donors/foundations: $90 million (donors include Terry & Carolyn Gannon Fund, T. Milton and Marilyn Honea, Eric Kanowsky)

Corporations: $50 million (donors include Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Amgen, Sequenom)

Source: UCLA