A few weeks ago, Jim Clark made a confession to a newsmagazine reporter: "I'm not interested in small things." Coming from the man who founded a trio of billion-dollar high-tech companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon -- that was hardly breaking news. But Clark, no doubt, also was thinking about his next big deal: a $150 million gift to Stanford.
A few days later, it was official. The donation, the largest since the University's founding grant, will fund a new research center designed to crack open the secrets of life at the molecular level. Nicknamed Bio-X, the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences will house 400 engineers, physicians, scientists and technicians collaborating on everything from genetic coding to tissue regeneration. The idea is to make giant leaps in the treatment of disease and to create technology that can be spun off to the private sector. "Silicon Valley and Stanford go hand in hand," says Clark, an engineering professor from 1979 to 1982. "When companies get their start from Stanford, people who benefited . . . have got to give something back."
Top universities across the country are pushing to create similar centers. But the combination of Clark's gift and Stanford's top-ranked faculty put the University at the forefront of the trend. "This whole notion of biology becoming a foundational science for lots of different disciplines is something that we can build on," says Provost John Hennessy, who has known Clark since their days as junior professors. "It's the new new thing."
Announced on October 27, the gift is among the largest ever to an institution of higher education. It will help finance a 220,000-square-foot building, endow faculty and pay for equipment. Groundbreaking for the center, which will sit just inside Campus Drive near the Medical Center, is set for June 2000.
Clark, 55, has been called "the Silicon Valley seer." Silicon Graphics pioneered high-end computer imaging. Netscape blazed a path to the world wide web. And Healtheon centralized online medical data. Clark's latest venture, MyCFO, offers financial services for the wealthy. But compared to the new Stanford center, those may be remembered as, well, small things.
