Cross-disciplinary biomedical research at Stanford University will benefit from a $150 million gift by Jim Clark, a former engineering professor at the university who went on to start Netscape, Silicon Graphics and other companies. With 50 faculty, 400 students and a 20,700-m2 building, the new Clark Center will be a mid-range privately funded biomedical research institute, equal in size to San Diego's Salk Institute and somewhat larger than the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The center aims to foster collaborations between basic, applied and clinical sciences. Stanford has taken a lead on this with its Institute of Biomedical Engineering, which merges traditionally separate disciplines such as engineering and radiology to approach tasks like simulating the physiology of a knee joint, or calculating blood flow patterns to show how the vasculature is affected by shunts.

The center's programs are all based on the premise that it is no longer possible to think about biomedicine without computation. As industry continues to drain off talent from academia faster than it can be replaced, "we'd like to double the number of people at Stanford who want to make biocomputation a key part of their work," says Russ Altman, who directs a Stanford informatics program.

The largest part of the center, "Bio-X," will be a more diffuse—hence the variable embedded in its name—aggregation of disciplines, according to its biochemist director, Jim Spudich. 'Neuroinformatics', for example, with its heavy imaging component, requires talent from medicine, cognitive psychology, molecular biology, physics and computer science.

Unlike Harvard or Berkeley, Stanford has no Charles River or San Francisco Bay separating its main campus from its medical school, but Campus Drive, a main thoroughfare that bisects the campus, has historically separated medicine from academic departments. The Clark building will bridge Stanford's 'moat' both physically and intellectually. "It makes enormous sense to have this building as a unifier," says Mike Levitt, chair of Structural Biology. "Clark's initial investment of $150 million will produce value in the billions," he predicts.