Small Science

“Fifty years ago, there was no Silicon Valley. Thirty years ago, there was no biotech industry. Ten years ago, there was no Internet. Who know what new enterprises will be created or what medical breakthroughs will result because of our institutes? But this we do know: Breakthroughs will occur. And I want to make sure they will occur right here in California.”

Five days into the year 2000, when Gov. Davis announced his plan for securing the future of technology in his state, it was treated like an afterthought to a State of the State address that primarily was concerned with improving the California school system. “Last but not least” is how he introduced it, and then went on to promise $75 million a year for four years — $300 million in total — to launch three world-class institutes of science and innovation. These would be located on University of California campuses and would, so Davis predicted, ensure that the state maintains and expands its role “at the leading edge of technological invention in the 21st century.”

The seeds sowed in Davis’ State of the State request then took a few weeks to germinate. Only a handful of precedents existed for such state-funded research institutes, but few, if any, were this ambitious. Moreover, no money had yet been allocated by the state, and the governor had required that any candidate institutes prove they could raise $2 from industry, foundations or the federal government for every dollar that came from California. To university administrators around the state, it all sounded vaguely implausible, like a dream vision that would vanish in the harsh morning of political reality. But UCLA administrators decided it would be worth discussing and maybe drafting a proposal. After all, the university had world-class scientists, which certainly made it worth a shot.

One year later — one “yearlong fire drill” in the words of UCLA chemist Jim Heath — the result is the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), a joint endeavor of UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, with Davis’ promise of $100 million in funding and more than $250 million in matching funds. The CNSI will be a multidisciplinary institute that will cut across the boundaries of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and material science to develop technologies and devices on a scale of a few billionths of a meter. Nanoscience and nanotechnology are now considered the great scientific frontiers of the 21st century, promising to revolutionize a spectrum of disciplines from quantum computing to health-care technology and even national security. The kinds of discoveries and inventions that are likely to emerge from the CNSI — smaller, faster and more efficient computers; a lamp that uses a tenth as much energy as modern lightbulbs and never burns out; lighter and stronger building materials that may make cars, buses and other forms of transportation more energy-efficient; medicines that target the molecular errors that cause disease will, says UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale, impact every facet of society and will be instrumental in “creating the technologies of California’s future, and future generations in California and the world will benefit from the discovery and innovation pioneered by this unique enterprise.”

At UCLA, the driving force behind the CNSI was Roberto Peccei, a theoretical physicist who in the winter of 2000 was both dean of physical sciences and interim vice chancellor for research. (Since then, Peccei says, “I made the brilliant career move from dean and interim vice chancellor to vice chancellor and interim dean.”) It was roughly six weeks after Gov. Davis’ State of the State address, says Peccei, sometime in late February, that the UCLA administration started taking the initiative seriously.

The result was a series of meetings between the deans of the science-based schools and divisions on campus to assess how UCLA might win an institute of its own. While they discussed a range of possibilities, nanotechnology and nanoscience seemed to be an obvious choice. President Clinton was in the process of launching a $225-million National Nanotechnology Initiative, and researchers and administrators throughout the country were raving about the scientific possibilities. Charles Vest, the president of MIT, for instance, was saying that nanotechnology “may well rival the development of the transistor or telecommunications in its ultimate impact.” Perhaps most important, UCLA already had some of the best researchers in the world working in the area, such as Heath, J. Fraser Stoddart and Emily Carter in chemistry, Chih-Ming Ho in engineering and Michael Phelps, the inventor of the PET scan, in medicine.

Meanwhile, Peccei was talking to Matt Tirrell, dean of the engineering school at UCSB, about possibly working together on a single concerted effort. UCSB also had been discussing a range of proposals, but they knew that their strength was in materials and devices, where UCSB is a world leader. “So at some point we also made a decision to make our principal proposal be in the nanotechnology area,” says Tirrell. Indeed, a handful of the UCSB faculty had been involved in writing reports and hosting workshops that fed into the president’s National Nanotechnology Initiative. By early March, UCLA and UCSB agreed to pool expertise and resources and collaborate on a single proposal.

“The focus on nanosystems then became pretty natural,” says Peccei. “One aspect of nanosystems applied to information technology, which would capitalize equally on our strengths and those of Santa Barbara. The other aspect would look at nanosystems in the realm of molecular medicine, which played more to the strength here at UCLA in the medical school and life sciences. One of our guiding principles here was to do something that would benefit as large a community as was sensibly possible. In that sense, nanosystems was a very good stretch and not an unnatural one.”

Step two in the process was to find somebody to lead the effort. Peccei says the choice at UCLA was clear: Jim Heath, a rising young star in nanotechnology. Heath had earned his Ph.D. at Rice University working with Richard Smalley, Harry Kroto and Bob Curl on the experiment that earned the latter three the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996. He had been at UCLA since 1994, where he has worked on nanotechnology, quantum dots, artificial solids and the technology that would allow all these phenomena to be chemically synthesized — grown like a biological organism, in effect, from the bottom up rather than etched by computer, as modern silicon technology is, from the top down. “He’s probably the person who has the broadest talents and imagination,” says Peccei, “and I felt he would provide the necessary scientific leadership. And when Jim speaks, people listen to him. He was an absolute key.”

At UCSB, Heath’s counterpart would be Evelyn Hu. Before coming to UCSB in 1984, Hu worked for 10 years at Bell Laboratories on the science of nanostructures in superconducting technologies. At UCSB, she studied semiconductor technology and also worked to understand the electrical properties of materials at a nanoscale. For the past six years, as director of a National Science Foundation-funded Science and Technology Center at UCSB, she had been concentrating on “quantized electronic structures.” While Hu knew Heath by his work and reputation, she had never met him. The next six months, she says, would turn out to be an “intense bonding experience.”

“We had our first meeting in the beginning of April with most of the people who would be involved,” says Hu. “The preproposal was due around the beginning of May, and they would tell us at the end of June which six of the 11 preproposals had been chosen to go on. The proposals were then due on Oct. 6, although they originally told us the beginning of September. That was the time frame we had to work with.”

The next three months would be spent writing and traveling. Their preproposal was among the final six chosen, but it had to be dramatically expanded and honed. The reviewers also had doubts about whether Heath and Hu had sufficient administrative experience to deal with a multi-hundred-million-dollar institute, as the CNSI would be. As a result, says Peccei, it was decided to seek an administrator from outside of the institutions. The choice was Martha Krebs, a physicist who was running the Office of Science in the Department of Energy, which meant, among other things, that she oversaw the DOE’s national laboratory system. Peccei had known Krebs for years, and when he asked her to be the administrative director of the CNSI, she readily agreed.

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.”

Working from that standpoint, they evolved a structure of participation, from those companies willing to spend at least $2 million a year as “founding partners” to small start-ups that might want to take part in any way they can but didn’t have the cash or the in-kind contributions to spare. “Depending on how strongly they got involved, we offered them the potential for lab space, for pre-public disclosure of intellectual property, for first right of refusal, and so on,” says Heath.

Among the founding partners was Hewlett-Packard, where former UCLA chemistry professor Stan Williams was running the company’s quantum-science research group. Williams had been collaborating with Heath for years, and so when the two went to Williams’ boss to pitch him on the California NanoSystems Institute, says Williams, he was sold immediately. “Being a founding partner means we get a seat on the board, which means we have influence over the research directions. We get access to facilities; we get access to faculty. We even get our own laboratory facility on campus at UCLA — an incubator lab — where we can literally close the door and work on our proprietary stuff, or we can open the door and invite people in. We can go across the hall and talk to people from UCLA or even other companies. It’s a great concept, something we were anxious and eager to do.”

In fact, the HP executives were so enamored of the CNSI concept that they went out of their way to help Heath, Hu and their colleagues pitch to other companies.

“We contacted a bunch of other companies and told them what a great deal we thought it was and invited them to participate along with us,” Williams says. “And some of them, like Motorola and Dupont, agreed and have bought into it, and others took a wait-and-see attitude. My guess is that eventually they will have to buy in or they will be sorry. There is this whole issue of what some people now call ‘coopetition.’ In other words, your biggest competitor in one area is often your biggest collaborator in another area. We thought nanoscience is all very pre-competitive so it’s to everyone’s advantage to be collaborating in some areas, and the NanoSystems Institute gives us a great way to do it.”

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 Dec. 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.

The announcement that the UCLA-UCSB proposal was a winner led to some mild and short-lived celebration among the participants. “We were really happy,” as Hu puts it. “We breathed a little more deeply, and then we realized the real work is yet to come.”

For starters, three CNSI buildings — two at UCLA and one at UCSB — now have to be planned, designed, built and staffed, with the goal of creating what Hu calls the “new collaborative working environment of the future.” All three buildings, she says, “are intended to be both focal points for activities of the institute and also a means of bringing people and researchers together, with shared facilities and the kinds of instrumentation needed to be accessed by a broad scope of researchers.”

The unique CNSI multidisciplinary training and education program also must be developed. Says Hu: “Part of what makes the investment in CNSI worthwhile is the development of new kinds of multidisciplinary educational programs that will produce new kinds of students, with new kinds of skills, with a broader vision and perspective and with experience already in working with industry in the kinds of multidisciplinary teams that will be needed in the next generation.”

In the meantime, Heath, Hu and their colleagues are busy tracking down temporary facilities for imaging and manufacturing, and beginning to recruit faculty, as well.

“The task right now is pretty Herculean,” says Heath. “My major fear is that if we don’t do it right, the CNSI will end up nothing more than a research motel, with a bunch of unrelated people taking up lab space. That’s not the point; it’s supposed to be a real institute with a common scientific purpose. That’s going to be a challenge to make sure we do that correctly.”

Peccei is optimistic and says he foresees three future accomplishments of the CNSI, although with different degrees of likelihood. “One thing I’m sure will happen,” he says, “is the CNSI will be training a different and new generation of graduate students who are much more broadly multidisciplinary. We will be training physicists who will understand biology at a good operating level, or computer scientists with a good foundation in material sciences. I am sure there will be some very interesting, new and quite successful industry-university collaborations that will emerge from this.”

Then Peccei adds a footnote. “Another thing I wish very much to happen, but I’m less sure about, is that some great science will emerge from the institute. That’s always much harder to predict, but there are certainly some spectacular things going on already in nanosystems, and there’s a good chance they will come to fruition in CNSI.”