EDITORIAL
Biotech 'synergy' talk continues to excite

The vision emerging for the UH medical school, now a-building in Kaka'ako, continues to sparkle with exciting, outside-the-box thinking.

Imagine, if you can, how different the picture would be if this project were being crafted by state government functionaries. To his credit, former Gov. Ben Cayetano did much from a fiscal standpoint to help this crucial facility get off the ground, while managing to stay the heck out of the way of its conceptual development.

Thanks are also due in a couple of sectors:

• The autonomy granted by voters to the university in 2000, which prevented the project from being bogged down in political meddling and cost overruns.
• The state tobacco settlement fund. Some $150 million worth of bonds secured through that fund will finance the first phase of the project.

That development clearly is a work in progress. UH now is talking about creating an independent scientific institute to operate in conjunction with the nearby medical school campus and adjoining cancer research center.

Local business and political leaders are being introduced to Leroy Hood, a world-renowned scientist whose lab developed the automated DNA sequencing technology that enabled the Human Genome Project. Hood, a member of the UH med school's advisory board, has been advocating that the Kaka'ako campus model itself after some highly successful Mainland examples:

• The Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, near the University of Washington in Seattle, which Hood founded.
• The Salk Institute for Biotechnology near the University of San Diego.
• The Whitehead Institute for Technology, near the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.

These world-class facilities collaborate with the faculty of their affiliated universities, operating outside the university's bureaucracy for flexibility and cooperation with private industry.

Such facilities bring in hundreds of millions of dollars each year from industry and government sources, and development of one here could be a quantum leap in the university's ability to stimulate economic growth in Hawai'i.

We trust the new Lingle administration will, with a continuing minimum of micromanagement, encourage growth of the med school in these directions. It will need to participate in updating the ethical and financial guidelines by which UH scientists take their work, often copiously rewarded, to private industry.

But only a handful of universities have freed such facilities from the bureaucracy imposed by most academic institutions, recasting them, in Hood's words "for the future, and not the past." Together with the state-of-the-art lab space and synergies with the new cancer research center and the med school, we can hope that Kaka'ako will be the scene of an exciting and rewarding new awakening for Hawai'i.

The entire endeavor should be an immediate boost for the local economy. But more broadly, there is a pressing need for a world-class medical institution that will promote UH's research profile and add luster to our long-term economic prospects.