San Diego

The California Institutes for Science and Innovation — four high-profile interdisciplinary facilities built at a cost of $400 million — are going through a turbulent time just months before researchers move into the new buildings.

A bleak financial outlook, caused by fiscal difficulties at state level, is widely believed to have contributed to the departure of Marvin Cassman, head of one of the new facilities — the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology and Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3). Cassman, a former director of the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences who was appointed with much fanfare in 2002, quietly quit late last month and did not respond to requests for an interview.

Shaky start: the San Francisco labs of the University of California's QB3 Institute, which has lost its inaugural director. Credit: UCSF

The institutes are designed to channel expertise from across the University of California (UC) campuses into scientific discoveries that will spur statewide economic development. They were to have had an annual budget of at least $10 million each for operating costs. But California is going through a fiscal crisis. The proposed budget for the next financial year, which will be finalized by July, cuts $370 million from the total UC budget and hands the centres just $1 million each.

Because scientists at the institutes will fund their research through external grants, the researchers say they are confident that good science will still get done at the new facilities. But many fear that their efforts could be held back by problems with operating costs. Keith Yamamoto, a biochemist at UC San Francisco and executive vice-dean of the university's medical school, says the issue is of “grave concern”.

At the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, based at the UC San Diego and Irvine campuses, director Larry Smarr says that they are “slowing down the growth” of programmes and may not initially occupy the entire new San Diego building. Administrators at the campuses that host the other two centres — the California NanoSystems Institute at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at four campuses — say that they will use university funds to pay the operating costs.

QB3 will be run until 30 June by Graham Fleming, director of physical biosciences at UC Berkeley. Officials are exploring options for QB3's directorship after then.