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As you can see by going to the very thorough article by Terri Somers in the December 5, 2004, SignOnSanDiego.com by the Union-Tribune entitled "Biotech cluster bluster--San Diego, Bay Area both working to land new institute for stem cell research", the key issue in embryonic stem cell research today is where to put the administrative offices of the California Institute for Regenerative Research (CIRM), the institution that will oversee the expenditure of almost $3 billion in research grants over the next ten years.

The main competition, as always in California, is between North California and South California. Specifically, it's between the University of California at San Diego, and its biotech spin-offs and Stanford University and its. As a joke, someone suggested putting it in Sacramento, but that will never happen. Legislators will have nothing to say about how this money is spent.

Focus your attention for a second on the one paragraph in the article that is NOT about the rivalry between the North and South. It's the 11th one from the bottom:

"Modern communication tools will enable grant applicants to interact with the committee and its administrative offices wherever they wind up, the committee members said."

These "modern communications tools" must be a reference to broadband Internet, which already allows users to exchange voice messages, video images, reports, e-mail, files, x-ray images, computer programs, visualization algorithms and every other manner of data, information, fact, speculation, theory, observation, comment or joke that could conceivably be exchanged by the administrative team of the CIRM wherever they happened to end up.

Why not skip the fight over where to put the CIRM Admin Center and put it everywhere/nowhere, by putting it in cyberspace, online, on a set of servers in Palo Alto AND La Jolla, while letting the administrative team continue to stay at home and telecommute to their work in overseeing the research envisioned by Proposition 71?
Both the San Diego area (home to QUALCOMM and any number of biotech firms) and the Bay Area (home to Intel and almost as many other biotech firms), are both so intensely high-tech and loaded with smart, rich, ambitious, aggressive, creative, and future-oriented people that it would be a shame to deprive either area of the honor of being the home to the CIRM.

By putting the CIRM everywhere/nowhere, in cyberspace, the WHOLE of California would be honored as the home of this endeavor, and all Californians could take pride in knowing that this important work was being conducted from where they live.

Both the Bay Area and the San Diego biotech corridor are also home, let us not forget, to companies and research institutions and academic departments focusing on "hard tech," microelectronics, computing, and the Internet. These people, their companies, research centers, and universities have, together, created and built the Internet, increased its power thousands-fold, and are now deeply involved in moving it into wireless cyberspace.

What better way to create jobs, generate revenue, and establish California as the world's greatest center of technological innovation than to synergize the power of "hard tech" and "soft tech" through the collaboration of the telecomputational and the biomedical? We can accomplish this by calling upon the "hard techies" to build a platform that will allow the "soft techies" to carry on the work of the CIRM from wherever they are.

In addition to saving money for real research, putting the CIRM into cyberspace will facilitate using grid technology to aggregate the computing power necessary for cutting-edge biological (and related nanotech) research. The computer network built to support CIRM's operations could easily become the core for the CaliGrid network, which could use the enhanced broadband and mega-and-ultra-broadband connectivity envisioned by Internet2 and the Broadband California projects to assemble massive amounts of computing power to be applied to the specific needs of biomedical researchers, including the functions of DNA sequencing, the analysis of protein folding, and the modeling of biological systems, from the sub-cellular to the social and planetary.

Combining the power and versatility of massively parallel computing and the Internet with the paradigms and procedures of biological research would give California an unmatched lead in becoming the world leader in both "hard" and "soft" tech. (See the September 7, 2004, Etopia Media Medical News Network interview with Dr. Erik Jakobsson at the NIH, in which he discusses the Center for Quantitative Biology at Princeton University and other topics in computational biology for more about the merging of computation and biological research.)

Doing this would give California the same advantages vis a vis hard tech that Proposition 71 gives it in soft. And the economic power that will flow from that synergy will position California to go its own geo-political way whenever it sees fit to do so.

Alexander was able to cut the Gordian knot by thinking outside the box. As we embark upon the epic journey of discovery now being fueled by $3 billion in Proposition 71 money, we will need to look outside of all the boxes we encounter, starting with this one regarding which of two Californias should get pride of place in handing out this money.

Putting the CIRM everywhere/nowhere in California would get us off to a great start.