By Jayne Fried
Small Times Correspondent
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 15, 2001 — To forge the nano frontier, Martha Krebs has to inspire — and negotiate with — a whole lot of people.
Krebs, the longest serving science director in the history of the U.S. Department of Energy, earlier this year moved to Southern California after six years inside the Washington Beltway to become founding director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). The institute is a joint project between the universities of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, private industry and the state of California.
The goal of the institute is to build and examine natural systems atom by atom and molecule by molecule. The applications that could come from the research are broad, including higher performance materials, new concepts and devices for next generation computers and molecular-level diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Krebs’ role in the process includes encouraging faculty, meeting with legislators and negotiating through the funding process.
While in Washington, D.C., Krebs learned about all the institutions that carry out the nation’s science policies and about the art of leadership in science. “I was extraordinarily privileged,” Krebs said of her work there. She helped found the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a far-reaching federal plan to unite government agencies dedicated to discoveries in nanoscience. “My major job was to encourage and to communicate inside and out,” Krebs said.
“There’s more hands-on kind of work here,” she said, speaking of settling into Southern California campus life. From her office in the engineering complex at UCLA, Krebs plans to watch the main building of the California NanoSystems Institute go up. Groundbreaking is tentatively planned for the spring.
The CNSI was launched with $100 million in state funds over the next four years. The money has strings attached. The universities had to demonstrate that private money backed up state funds two-to-one, which was accomplished for the first year of operations. Of the total state funding, $95 million is for buildings on both campuses, while $5 million is the administrative component.
“What the state has done is extraordinarily valuable,” Krebs said. “Without the facilities, the research can’t happen.”
FROM THE HILL TO HOLLYWOOD
Krebs speaks with the calmness and efficiency of a physicist turned administrator.
Krebs earned her Ph.D. in physics in 1975 from the Catholic University of America. She became a staff director of the House Subcommittee on Energy Development and Applications for three years, after working for other congressional committees and as a science and technology analyst at the Library of Congress.
Before President Clinton nominated her to the Department of Energy post, Krebs was an associate laboratory director at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a position she held since 1983. She established the laboratory’s Center for Science and Engineering Education, which provides collaborative research experiences for students, teachers and University of California faculty.
QUESTIONS OF SCIENCE AND ETHICS
The institute being developed at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara bridges bio and information technology. And it is in this expanse that her job is more intricate than just overseeing construction of new buildings to house students, faculty and lab space for corporate partners to study and develop nanosystems. As Krebs points outs, “science changes faster than human concerns.”
Questions such as: When does life begin? What does it mean to be a human? How close should you get into people’s lives? “These questions are not going away,” she said.
“Until probably the last 20 or 30 years, scientists, in general, didn’t have to really grapple with those questions of privacy and when life begins,” Krebs said. That’s changed. “As we proceed in nanoscience and technology, philosophical questions will have to be settled. On the information technology side (of nanotechnology), we are going to have privacy issues. On the medical side, there will be questions about privacy and life.”
Her advice: “We are simply going to have to deal with it in an open and engaged way. “It means we are going to have to talk to people outside of science, not just the general public, but other scholars,” she said. “Quite honestly I can’t imagine a better place to do it than in the great universities of this country.”
THE BUSINESS SIDE
Added to this mix is the business side of things. The universities are forging alliances with business to bring nanoscience products to the market.
On her desk is a list of corporations that last October signed on for a total of $46.7 million for cash or in-kind commitments for the first operational year of CNSI. The companies range from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Cisco Systems Inc. to tiny companies such as Sputter Films Inc.
Although CNSI has commitments from industry, not all the intellectual property arrangements are complete. “What we have are letters of commitment and interest from these different companies,” Krebs said. “We are in the process of turning these into real arrangements that we both will stand by.”
In addition to the list, CNSI has been contacted by other companies that are interested in collaborations. However, since state funding for CNSI was announced last December, the dot-com crash and energy crisis have jolted the Southern California economy.
“The economy, especially in this high-tech area, is really stressed,” she said, “but the people continue to be interested. It’s not a matter of commitment, there may be some adjustment of timing.”
Part of the state funding will be used to construct laboratories for partners from industry to bring their scientists to work with the UCLA and UC Santa Barbara faculty and postdoctoral students. “They will take the basic knowledge that we have gained and do the initial steps that might take it to a product,” she said. Besides potential products, companies also are investing in the next generation of scientists and engineers.
ABOUT THE INSTITUTE
CNSI will comprise 180,000 square feet at UCLA. The main building will be 140,000 square feet. Another 40,000 square feet on two floors of the Engineering One building will house the Integrated Molecular Science Facility, which will be a bionanofabrication center.
UCLA chemist James Heath, who also is co-scientific director of CNSI, is among the investigators interested exploring biologically based materials in combination with semiconductor devices. Heath is among a team of UCLA chemists and biochemists who are reporting rapid progress toward the creation of molecular computers.
“The first realization of the technology are biochips,” Krebs said. “We also have collaborators, for example, in the human genetics department in the medical school who are interested in working with us.”
The bionanofabrication facility will be more than a tradition clean room. It will have extensions of semiconductor fabrication technology that will be able to lay down features at the nanoscale. It also will have an adjacent biological culture area. “Researchers could extract DNA from bacteria that would be targeted at biological materials that would be of interest to us,” Krebs said.
Providing space for chemists and biologists to work side-by-side, while not unusual in an industry lab or at one of the big national laboratories, is unusual for a university, Krebs said.
At present, the biological materials are down in the UCLA medical school, which is a world of its own with its maze of tunnels. On another part of the campus, chemists make polymers, for example. At it stands now, if you want to lay down these materials in conjunction with semiconductor fabrication, you have to transport them, Krebs said.
Referring to Heath’s discoveries, “we’re at a point where he wants to go from one or two or 10 chips to maybe a hundred or a thousand chips,” Krebs said. “He’s at the point of thinking about the devices — where he not only wants to prove the principle of function, but to be able to demonstrate that you can do it dependably. What he would like is to have these kinds of chemical production facilities right next to a fabrication facility because that’s what it’s going to take to get reproducibility at a larger scale than he can now.”
NEXT GENERATION OF STUDENTS
The main building will house, in addition to instruments needed to support nanoscience and engineering, a place for students to be trained in a different environment.
“You walk around in this building,” she said, “and you’ve got maybe on one floor computer science and engineering labs. On another floor you have chemical engineering labs, but it’s all engineering. You go across to chemistry and you’ve got maybe organic chemistry in one part of the building and physical chemistry in the other, but it’s all chemistry.”
She looked out from her window at land that is now part of a parking lot. “We’re not going to have a floor of biologists and a floor of engineers and a floor of chemists. We’re going to have a floor of chemists and biologists and engineers. We’re going to be able to slip in some theorists and their computers on the floor.
“Basically the point of view is we want the kids to live together,” she said. “At this point in time, it think it’s probably fair to say there won’t be another building like this on campus.”