San Diego

California is pumping $300 million into three new centres for biomedicine, nanotechnology and telecommunications at the University of California (UC). The centres, which will be based in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, will each involve several UC campuses, corporations and investors in an ambitious plan to create new technologies.

A number of state governments, including California, give limited funds to research, but the great bulk of US research funding comes from the federal government. This year, for example, California will receive an estimated $14 billion in such funding.

But the size of the state initiative — made possible by California's booming economy and budget surplus — may open a new era of major scientific investment by states.

Forward thinking: state governor Gray Davis reveals plans for California to 'invent the future'. Credit: AP

Calling the project “the most ambitious scientific research initiative ever undertaken” by the state, Gray Davis, California's Democrat governor, says the hope is to create “three world-class research and innovation centres with a single mission: invent the future”.

The centres and collaborators are: the California Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedicine at UC San Francisco, with UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz; the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Los Angeles, with UC Santa Barbara; and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego, with UC Irvine. Each will include new buildings to house laboratories, academics and students.

The centres were recommended by a five-member panel of scientific authorities, chaired by Richard Lerner, president of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The state rejected three other proposals, but one of these — a centre for information technology at UC Berkeley, to work with three other campuses — was sufficiently strong that UC Davis will seek funding for it in the state legislature's upcoming budget.

A UC Irvine proposal for a centre for systems biology, and a centre for agricultural genomics involving UC Davis and UC Riverside, were not funded. Proponents of the agricultural genomics project were disappointed, but said that promises of industry funding mean that they aim to go ahead with the centre in a modified form.

Under the state's plan, each of the three designated centres will receive $100 million of taxpayers' money over the next four years. Each centre must also raise twice this from other sources, making the total potential investment worth $900 million.

Although there are many joint research projects between UC researchers and industry, the explicit mission of these centres to work towards applied technologies has raised some questions about their academic independence.

“It is a challenge to sort how we will do this and preserve the mission of the university,” says Zach Hall, vice-chancellor for research at UC San Francisco. “But we are taking on that challenge and want to make it work.”