San Diego

James H. Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. and the Netscape Communications Corp., announced last week that he is donating $150 million to Stanford University for a new biomedical engineering facility.

According to university officials, the grant to Stanford, where Clark was a professor between 1979 and 1982, is the largest gift to the university since it was founded and is one of the biggest bequests ever to a US university.

The Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences will be built on campus near the university's science facilities, with completion expected in 2002. Known on the Stanford campus as ‘Bio-X’, the facility has been in the planning stages for nearly two years, beginning as a grassroots effort by faculty members keen to create a focal point for multidisciplinary research.

It will house about 400 scientists and technicians. Some 50 faculty members, about 30 per cent of whom will be new recruits, will conduct research in bioengineering, biocomputing, neuroscience and imaging at the molecular, cellular and system level.

The complex is to include a ‘reality centre’, in which displays on the ceiling, floor and walls will allow the projection of images to show visitors the inside of structures such as cells or arteries.

“I chose to do this because of my academic roots, and Stanford is a great place,” says Clark. “If you're allowed to be in an academic setting and create the springboard of a business effectively without undue impediments, then you have an obligation to respond in kind.”

John Hennessy, Stanford's provost and a former colleague of Clark in the Department of Electrical Engineering, says discoveries in genetics and cellular biology, with advances in computing and the miniaturization of devices, “will provide incredible opportunities for advances in biomedicine, bioengineering and bioscience”.

Neuroinformatics is of particular interest to Clark, who decided that the most effective way to contribute was to fund a broader effort, with biology as the central focus. During his career, Clark moved from engineering to physics and then to computer science. His first major success was a computer chip, called a geometry engine, that was the foundation of Silicon Graphics.