LOS ANGELES, Aug. 26 — Seeking to harness biotechnology in new ways, the United States Army is establishing a research institute at three universities to apply biology to the development of sensors, computers and materials.
The new center, the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, will have its headquarters at the University of California at Santa Barbara, with some of the work also to be done at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The initial grant is for up to $50 million over five years, the Army and the universities said.
The Army has long been involved in medical research involving biotechnology, including defense against biological warfare agents. But it wants to broaden the use of biotechnology to nonmedical areas. Such technology might include better materials for uniforms or armor, faster and lighter computers and batteries and more elaborate sensors. It could also help in the Pentagon's plan to make the Army more agile and able to deploy more rapidly to fight terrorism and wars.
"We feel that this coming century the big technologies will be biotechnology, that biotechnology has the potential to transform how we conduct our business probably as much as I.T. did in the past century," said James J. Valdes, a scientific adviser for biotechnology at the Army, referring to information technology.
The new institute will do unclassified research intended mainly to apply biotechnology to the development of materials and information processing.
"We use biotech as a tool for discovery," said Daniel Morse, director of the new institute and a professor of molecular genetics and biochemistry at Santa Barbara.
Computer chips, for instance, are made by etching away silicon to form tiny structures. But it might be possible to make even smaller and speedier chips by building structures molecule by molecule from the ground up, as living creatures do. Such smaller and speedier chips might be useful in munitions that could tell friend from foe or sensors that could be embedded in a soldier's uniform.
Dr. Morse has found that marine sponges can assemble structures of silica, a compound of silicon and oxygen, using an enzyme. He and colleagues have made a similar enzyme synthetically and hope to apply it to make semiconductor materials. Scientists at M.I.T., led by Angela M. Belcher, have evolved viruses that can make and organize minuscule wires and magnetic components.
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