Spring 2001
SMALL SCIENCE
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By
the time they handed in the proposal in early October, they had
a guarantee of $40 million from industry and a reasonable expectation
of another $200 million in federal and foundation funds. That more
than satisfied the governor's boundary conditions and, indeed, as
Heath says, "Considering the basic nature of the science we were
doing, our support was much greater than any of the referees thought
we would ever get."
Two
panels of experts from engineering and life sciences reviewed the
proposal. "The engineering panel and science panel that saw what
we were trying to do in information sciences were really excited
about the possibilities and loved us," says Heath. "The biomedical
types didn't quite get it. What we were proposing had a much longer-range
impact than the kind of things biotech companies are interested
in. They care about drug discovery, rapid screening, things like
that."
The
proposal was then judged by what Peccei calls a "super panel," which
was led by Richard Lerner, president of the Scripps Research Institute
in La Jolla, Calif., and included chemist Harry Gray of Caltech,
John Brauman, cognizant dean of science at Stanford University,
John Hennesy, president of Stanford, and Erling Norrby, secretary
general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a member of
the Board of Directors of the Nobel Foundation.
It
was clear, Peccei says, that the UCLA-UCSB proposal was considered
by the panel to be the strongest in pure science. "You could actually
imagine," he says, "that the people involved would eventually win
Nobel Prizes for things they discovered."
Gov.
Davis announced the winners on December 7, and the CNSI was at the
top of the list. Also awarded research funding were the California
Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, led
by UC San Diego in collaboration with UC Irvine, and the Institute
for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research,
a UC San Francisco-led effort with UC Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Davis
then said that he hoped to get money for a fourth institute, which
would be the Berkeley-based Center for Information Technology Research
in the Interest of Society.
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