Gates Foundation Invests in Biotech

A major gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will boost the Puget Sound area's biotechnology industry and position the University of Washington as a world leader in human genetic research. The foundation awarded $70 million to the University of Washington, by far the largest donation ever made to a university in the Pacific Northwest.

How will the money be used? About $60 million of the Gates donation will help pay for a $150 million, 265,000-square-foot biotechnology research building to be started in August and opened in 2005. The facility will house the UW departments of genome sciences and bioengineering. The remaining $10 million will fund genomics research of diseases in the developing world.

The University of Washington, if you have not noticed, as been making some steady in-roads into the life sciences world. Two years ago, the university was granted $30 million by the National Institutes of Health to establish two of the nation's three "Centers of Excellence'' in genomics. The third is at Yale University. Months later, two UW scientists were among eight designated as the most influential leaders of the Human Genome Project, a worldwide effort to map the human genetic code. Last summer, the UW recruited a third scientist, Robert Waterston, from Washington University in St. Louis to head its new genomics department.

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