The UC regents have approved the funding plan for the $95 million Genome and Biomedical Sciences Building, a facility that will help make the campus an international leader in studies of genes that influence human health and development. Because the building will be partly paid for through a legislative funding mechanism, the campus still must get approval to build it from the state Legislature, which will be shaping the state budget this spring. The six-story building will have 212,000 gross square feet, about the same size as Meyer Hall (the campus's largest research facility to date). It will be located near the Health Sciences Complex and is expected to be completed in 2004. It will house the new UC Davis Genome Center, which will include dozens of faculty members studying the action of genes in growth, health, disease and behavior, and a revitalized pharmacology and toxicology department in the School of Medicine. It will also house 70 other research and administrative units of the School of Medicine and the campus's growing Division of Biomedical Engineering. Most of the new building's cost will be funded using the so-called Garamendi mechanism, which was created by legislation written in 1990 by then-state Sen. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove. The law allows the university to pay off a construction loan with overhead payments in federal research funds that would otherwise be funneled to the state. "This building is an example of how the enterprise of our faculty is helping to pay for a building," Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey says. "Part of the funds will come from a grant by the Whitaker Foundation, part from the chancellor's discretionary funds and part from the UC Davis Health System, but the bulk will come from indirect-cost recovery funds authorized through the Garamendi legislation." In fact, the Garamendi-style funding will cover $62.7 million of the construction costs. Of the re-mainder, $16 million will come from the School of Medicine Com-pensation Plan, $14.2 million from gifts and $2.2 million from campus funds. Grey points out that the research building is not the first to use the Garamendi funding solution. The Center for Comparative Medicine, completed in summer of 1998, was built using the same funding mechanism. The law allows the university to take out a construction loan and then pay it off using a percentage of research grants set aside as overhead charges that are funneled to the state. The overhead on research grants also pays for the building's ongoing operation and maintenance. Already the comparative medicine faculty is pulling in 1 1/2 times the needed funds to pay for the building.