A Sampling of Clips for 
March 15, 2005

* UCSD faculty and staff may obtain a copy of an article by e-mailing the University Communications Office

Plan to Close UCSD Hospital in Hillcrest Draws Ire
San Diego Union-Tribune, March 15- As UCSD officials prepare to make a case for closing their Hillcrest hospital to the UC Regents tomorrow, some former governmental leaders are denouncing the proposal, claiming that it violates the spirit of the agreement in which the County sold the building to the University 25 years ago to ensure care for the poor. (Quote by Ed Holmes, dean of the UCSD School of Medicine.) More

UCSD Officials Want to Close Hillcrest Medical Center
KFMB, Channel 8, March 15-Tuesday, administrators at UCSD will ask the University of California's Regents to close its medical center in Hillcrest. University leaders say the Hillcrest facility requires earthquake upgrades by the year 2030. That would be more expensive than expanding UCSD's Thornton Hospital in La Jolla. More

The Face of Biocom
San Diego Union-Tribune, March 15 - Fitness fanatic. Fine food connoisseur. Struggling keyboard player. Champion of the environment. Former milk inspector. It may come as a surprise to those who know Joe Panetta, but all of those monikers describe the 51-year-old who is best known as the omnipresent face of the region's biotechnology trade organization, Biocom. (Quote by Duane Roth, director of UCSD Connect.) More

Seismic Shift
Information Week, March 14 - For the past 20 years, federally funded supercomputing research has given birth to - or at least helped midwife - some of the computer industry's most significant technology breakthroughs. Last September, the National Science Foundation dissolved the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, or PACI, the agreement that since 1997 has funded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois and the San Diego Supercomputer Center - the United States' two largest supercomputing centers - with $35 million each annually, about half their budgets. (Quote by Larry Smarr, a computer-science professor at the University of California, San Diego.) More

Will Scripps Really be Worth it?
Palm Beach Post, Editorial, March 15 - As Gov. Bush spoke of his dream for Florida as he presided over the opening of The Scripps Research Institute's temporary Jupiter laboratory on Friday, I found myself wondering how we let ourselves be drawn so unquestioningly to Scripps. Do we really think it will attract 50 successful companies a year for eight years? That would be twice as many biotech startups as have survived in the United States every year for the past seven years. Create 44,000 jobs in Palm Beach County, just like in San Diego? There are only 200,000 biotech jobs in the nation, and other studies put the number in San Diego at no more than 25,000 - after 40 years. And Scripps wasn't even the prime creator of new companies. The University of California, San Diego was. More

Fences Don't Make Good
Neighbors, Say Visitors to the Border
Asbury Park Press, March 14 - Federal statistics show at least 1,300 people have died along the 1,900-mile U.S. border with Mexico since fiscal year 2000. A similar tally from the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego - a think tank that uses American and Mexican data to count the death toll - blames border crossings for more than 2,000 deaths since 2000. More