7 world-changing UC innovations that emerged from federal research funding

Late at night on Oct. 29, 1969, in the basement of UCLA's engineering school, a half-dozen people gathered around a refrigerator-sized computer.

A grad student named Charley Kline typed a brief message and sent it to colleagues gathered around another computer at Stanford Research Institute, over 300 miles away. It was the first time two networked computers communicated at a distance - a moment that many now consider the dawn of the internet.

"We knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was," said Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA computer scientist who's recognized as one of the web's original architects.

Kleinrock was UCLA's lead on a project called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Recognizing the military advantage of a fast, secure, far-flung communications network, the U.S. Department of Defense organized and funded a select group of university scientists across the country to build it. Throughout the early 1970s, Kleinrock and his collaborators, including faculty at UC Santa Barbara, solved the foundational programming and engineering elements that would carry the internet into people's homes a generation later.

It's no coincidence that one of history's most transformational technologies emerged from U.S. universities at a time when the federal government was making significant investments in research and development. In the mid-1960s, as the Department of Defense was launching ARPANET, federal spending on science made up nearly 2% of U.S. gross domestic product, an all-time high.

Then as now, much of that support flowed to academic scientists, including at the University of California, where faculty and students put it to work solving problems in consequential fields like medicine, technology and agriculture. It would be hard to overstate the return on that investment - from medical breakthroughs that have saved millions of lives to technologies that are now so ingrained in our daily lives it's hard to imagine life without them. Here are a few of UC's scientific blockbusters, made possible with federal science spending.

Read the full article on UC Newsroom.