Spring 2001
SMALL SCIENCE
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Heath
and Hu then wrote the bulk of the 400-page proposal. Krebs assisted
on the organizational aspects of the plan; Tirrell and Hal Monbouquette,
a UCLA chemical engineer, helped on the education aspects; Phelps
worked on the medical aspects of nanotechnology; and Peccei focused
on crafting the budget.
The
writing was probably the easy part, however. The hard part, as Peccei
says, calling upon the lingo of his native physics, "was set by
the boundary conditions of the governor" - the requirement that
any successful proposal raise $2 from outside sources for every
$1 provided by the state. Peccei, for instance, spent much of his
summer traveling to Washington to talk to government agencies and
"people on the Hill" about what kind of research funds they could
reasonably expect from the government. He spent the rest of his
summer, with Tirrell, Heath and Hu, making weekly visits to California
industry and giving the CNSI pitch.
"We
wanted to get them involved in our vision," says Heath, "to get
them to commit some real dollars. You name the company, we talked
to them."
And
when they weren't scheduling or attending meetings, they were developing
the industry-CNSI collaborative policy. "We tried to come to the
companies with a program that we thought would make financial sense
to them," says Heath. "For example, one thing the governor clearly
wants out of these institutes is both fundamental science and some
very early technology development. He wants to see this stuff make
it out to the marketplace. He wants start-ups and contracts. He
wants to see the next Silicon Valley. So we were faced with the
question of how best to make this happen as an institute. If you
look at why companies get involved with universities, typically
it's because of some really key infrastructure they can share -
maybe a manufacturing plant, a synchrotron ... something like that."
"We
thought the really key infrastructures for nanosciences research
would be a fabrication facility," continues Heath. "We don't know
what it looks like yet, but it's beginning to gel. So building a
fabrication facility really designed to explore how to manufacture
this technology from the bottom up would be attractive to industrial
participants. And then we tried to highlight the fact that whatever
buildings we built at Santa Barbara or UCLA would be really marquee
buildings used by a huge number of students and that having their
equipment or products used in the building would have catalytic
input. And we emphasized that we didn't want them to be spectators,
but participants, to help teach classes and to have a presence in
the laboratory. We wanted something more than the typical university-corporate
involvement."
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