by Kathleen Cason

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Intro  |  Charting the course   |  The team's beginnings   |  The pitch
Cross-country caravan   |  The gathering   |  Collaborations

CCRC Milestones

Glycoscience

The pitch

Fresh from their consulting trip to England, Albersheim and Darvill had a new mission: Establish a carbohydrate research center based on the principle of interdisciplinary collaboration and find a supportive institution. That meant they had to get the word out that they were willing to leave Colorado. They drew up a list of 12 universities and research institutes and crisscrossed the country, pitching their ideas.

On a cold January day in 1984, Albersheim invited an old friend to brunch at the Hotel Boulderado, a Victorian-era hotel in Boulder, Colo. As it turned out, that friend — Joe Key — headed the University of Georgia’s division of biological sciences and was on a sabbatical with a fledgling biotechnology start-up company based in Boulder.

When Albersheim mentioned the decision to form a carbohydrate research center and leave Colorado, Key asked if his group had considered Georgia. The University of Georgia soon appeared on the list.

That afternoon Key called an assistant to UGA’s president and told him that Albersheim and Darvill’s group was doing just the kind of research in biotechnology that UGA was looking to recruit. UGA had a one-time, $3 million allocation from the Georgia Legislature to advance some area of biotechnology research. After several meetings, UGA administrators decided to invest those funds in forming a Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC). By March, UGA held a reception for the group and soon afterwards details of the move were hammered out.

Albersheim and Darvill didn’t ask for a budget. If UGA would pay for faculty salaries, the pair would support the rest of their program with outside funding. UGA agreed to fund 10 faculty positions at the new center. If CCRC raised $200,000 per year per faculty member, the university would provide five additional faculty positions. By 2003, external funding exceeded the target by nearly three-fold, averaging $500,000 to $600,000 per faculty member.

“The catalyst for us, the real driving force for why we chose Georgia, was the availability of faculty slots,” Darvill said. “Because that’s how we saw you could create a real center. If you bring in new faculty who create their own research groups and you’ve got this nucleus, you can build on the nucleus.”

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Intro  |  Charting the course   |  The team's beginnings   |  The pitch
Cross-country caravan   |  The gathering   |  Collaborations