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At a groundbreaking ceremony last week for what will be the second largest building on the UC Berkeley campus, Gov. Gray Davis poured out praises for the imminent construction of the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility. 

The 285,000-square-foot building is expected to be a hub of biomedical research and innovation that will house state-of-the-art laboratories and bring together scientists from multiple fields to tackle health problems using an interdisciplinary approach and new technologies. 

“Out of this building will come new ideas, new industry and groundbreaking medical cures,” said Davis, speaking minutes before the ceremonial groundbreaking, which took place Friday afternoon at the former site of the old Stanley facility, located at the northeast section of campus on Gayley Road across from the Greek Theater. “The research that comes out of this facility will literally cure diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, will literally create new jobs, new industry and push back the frontiers of science and keep California on the cutting edge of science innovation.” 

But not everyone is enthusiastic about the development, which will expand the old Stanley building by four and a half times. The project incited public criticism when it was initially proposed three years ago as part of a larger UC Berkeley plan to seismically retrofit, modernize and develop the buildings in its northeast quadrant. That project, called the Northeast Quadrant Science Center, includes plans to replace nearby Davis Hall, a 38,000-square-foot building located south of Hearst Avenue, with a 145,000-square-foot building that would be the future home of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). The northeast quadrant plan also proposes the removal of the nearby lower Hearst parking structure, which has tennis courts and a skateboard park on its top tier, to make room for a 150-space parking lot.  

Residents have said the northeast quadrant plan will exacerbate traffic congestion and parking problems. They also worry about the project’s proximity to the Hayward Fault line. 

The main occupants of the facility will be the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, or QB3. The institute, a joint program between UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz, is one of four that the governor helped to create three years ago under his California Institutes for Science and Innovation project (Cal-ISI). Davis said the goal of the project, which relies on both state and private dollars, is to spur innovation that would replicate the success of Silicon Valley and spark economic growth throughout the state. 

The new Stanley building will also be the home of the university’s department of engineering and provide some facilities to CITRIS, another of the four institutes created under Cal-ISI. CITRIS researchers are developing such things as micromechanical “flying insects” that could some day conduct surveillance, and inexpensive electronic sensors that help firefighters locate people in burning buildings. The facility will also house the west coast’s only 900-megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, a device that helps reveal the structure of proteins. 

The new facility, which will replace the old 67,000-square-foot building, is expected to cost $162 million and is slated for completion in January 2006. The project will consist of eight above-ground floors and three underground stories and will include a 300-seat auditorium, 40 research and teaching laboratories, a multi-media classroom and a cafe. 

Davis said the new facility would not have been possible without the efforts of UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl, who in 2000 launched the Health Science Initiative, a project that aims to modernize and reorganize health sciences research on the campus. At the ceremony Berdahl said, “Future generations will benefit from the far-sighted plan,” and praised Davis for helping his project come to fruition. “This is what it really means to be an education governor,” he said. 

Jim Sharp, who lives on LeConte street about two blocks from the project site, has been the most outspoken critics of the plan. He said the university’s environmental impact report (EIR) was insufficient because it lumped several major developments, including the Stanley project and the Davis North project, into one document. “They swept the Stanley development into one very large EIR document so that it got about as much review as a very small project might normally get,” he said, adding that citizens have very little say in university development projects in general. “The EIR process is pretty much pro forma,” he said. 

“The most citizens can do is wave their hands a little bit. The city of Berkeley did almost nothing. They pretty much sat on their hands and that’s what they have been doing for the last 10 years,” which he said has put him and his neighbors in an “industrial blight zone.” 

Sharp said the Stanley project represents a dangerous trend in university development. “The biggest concern we see is UC morphing into an industrial park rather than as a place to educate students,” he said. “We have seen more emphasis on research and development with private industry ... A private firm, instead of building an industrial park in the Silicon Valley, can take advantage of the public space and cheaper labor that the university provides.”  

UC Berkeley spokesman Robert Sanders rejected the notion that the university is sacrificing academic integrity for commercial interests and said the new facility simply enables the University to continue the research it is already doing. “There aren’t any industry labs here, we are not bringing in industry,” he said. “These buildings are meant to continue the research we are already doing but we need new infrastructure that allows us to do modern research.” 

He said the facility will help “fuel the high tech and biotech industry” but emphasized that the university is “not interested in the product. We are interested in the knowledge.” Sanders added that the labs will be primarily occupied by students, and that industry “will not steer our research.”