Regents Voice Support
For Chu’s Initiatives

Berkeley Lab Director Steve Chu presented a 15-minute overview of his vision for the quest to find an alternative to fossil fuels at the University of California Board of Regents meeting on Wednesday. That vision was greeted with applause and supportive comments from the Regents, including this from Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez: “We stand together to assist you to make your dream come true.” They also had encouraging words for Physical Biosciences Division Director Jay Keasling. Go here to read the story.

Nobelists, Chancellor
Discuss Energy Issues

Six Nobel laureates, including Lab Director Steve Chu and physicist George Smoot, will gather at UC Berkeley with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau this Saturday to discuss energy self-sufficiency in the 21st century. In addition to Chu and Smoot, panelists include Donald Glaser, Yuan T. Lee, Daniel McFadden, and Charles Townes. The event will include a question-and-answer session. The sold-out program will be videotaped and, after the event, posted online here.

CITRIS Talks Include
Lab Materials Scientists

Majumdar
Alivisatos

The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, or CITRIS, each semester hosts a series of talks by speakers from academic, government, and private sectors. Two upcoming discussions include Berkeley Lab materials scientists. Next Thursday, Arun Majumdar will speak on "Matchmaking Global Energy Needs and Local Energy Technology," and on Feb. 28 Associate Lab Director Paul Alivisatos will look at " Nanotechnology and Renewable Energy." The lectures take place at noon in 290 Hearst Mining Building on campus.

UC Employees Must Take Online Ethics Course
By Tanya Schevitz

In the wake of last year's executive compensation scandal, the University of California is requiring every employee — from President Robert Dynes to the guy who empties his trash basket  — to complete an online course about ethics. The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC's 230,000 employees (including Berkeley Lab staff) on the university's expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. Members of UC's 26-member governing Board of Regents, including ex officio members such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, are supposed to complete the training, too. Full story.

Bush Recognizes
Social Entrepreneurship
By Bill Shore

Keasling

This opinion piece ran in Wednesday's edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Like many such events, last month's White House Summit on malaria was carefully choreographed with few surprises. But there was one. President Bush began the closing keynote address by thanking, among others, social entrepreneurs, citing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as "a fantastic example of using business acumen to address social problems." The greatest impact and legacy of the Gates Foundation may not be in how much they spend, but in how the dollars are spent, for example, the $43 million support of the efforts of Jay Keasling, a chemical engineer at Berkeley Lab, who is inventing an affordable way to manufacture artemisinin, the only drug reliably effective in curing malaria. Full story.