The U.S. Army Research Office has initially promised up to $50 million over five years to set up a new biotechnology research center to be headquartered at UCSB.

None of the research will be classified, said UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang, and "there's no research on the weapons systems."

The new Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies is a partnership among UCSB, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology and several industry partners.

Under the center's auspices, researchers will examine natural systems and attempt to mimic them to build better computers, sensors and communications equipment.

"It's a completely new generation, perhaps even a revolution in biotechnology," said Martin Moskovits, dean of science at UCSB.

Members of the new institute hope the work will help cement UCSB's reputation as a leader in the field.

"This grant didn't come to us by chance or fortune," said Matthew Tirrell, dean of engineering. "This new biotechnology is something that UCSB has created in the last few years."

"We've come up with an extraordinarily visionary and creative proposal," said Mr. Yang.

The center, with administrative offices in the California NanoSystems Institute and Engineering buildings, will include 60 faculty and about 200 researchers and students from the three universities, according to Daniel Morse, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

He will serve as director of the new institute.

Some of the work done there will help equip the Army of the future, but "the immediate applications will be in the industrial and civilian sector," Mr. Yang said.

"Our focus," he added, "is on basic, fundamental discoveries" -- like Mr. Morse's work on sea sponges.

Mr. Morse and his colleagues discovered specialized proteins that trigger and guide the formation of sponges' silica skeletons -- "a complete surprise," he said.

They wondered if a similar synthetic enzyme could be used to build other silicon-based structures -- like semiconductors.

That technology could offer a means of mass-producing semiconductors "from the ground up," Mr. Morse said, using a relatively benign process, rather than the current method of using chemicals to etch out computer chips.

And it could also be used to produce silicon-based plastics that have "enormous commercial applications," Mr. Morse said -- "everything from baby bottles to swim fins to steering wheels to building materials and insulation."

With funding from the center, he hopes to explore other natural mechanisms and "translate them into engineering solutions for a new generation of materials."

He pointed out that nature is in many respects far superior to current technology.

Plants turn light into energy with close to 100 percent efficiency, he said. The best science can do -- with photo-

voltaic cells -- is about 10 percent to 20 percent efficiency.

"And biological sensors outperform anything we can build," Mr. Morse added. "A moth's antenna can pick up a single molecule of the scent produced by their mate."

UCSB chemistry and biochemistry professor Guillermo Bazan and a team of graduate students are working on creating ultra-sensitive light emitting polymer sensors that can detect minute quantities of DNA that betray the presence of say, anthrax or HIV.

Such sensors might one day be implanted in clothing to detect biological weapons or used to test suspicious white powder found in envelopes.

They could also be used to efficiently screen blood for HIV or to aid in genetic testing.

Evelyn Hu, acting director of the California NanoSystems Institute, will be using grant money to further her research into how information is processed in nature and how those processes might be used to create better communications devices.

Such work crossed boundaries between myriad scientific disciplines.

And that kind of collaboration has been a hallmark of the UCSB approach, researchers say.

There, chemical engineers amble across to their colleagues in the physics department and biologists consort with mathematicians.

The new institute will foster such collaboration -- both within UCSB and between its staff and others at MIT and CalTech and in private industries.

Six industrial partners are already part of the new venture, including Santa Barbara-based Veeco Instruments Inc., which manufactures tools for nanoscience and nanotechnology -- including a microscope that can see individual atoms.

The center, Mr. Yang said, will be "a model for government, university and industry collaboration."

"The institute will definitely become a national flagship," he added.