Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

During the mid-1960s, two federally funded Peninsula facilities pushed research deep into the atom and far beyond Earth's airy envelope. Other trends of the era included the buildup of a world-class medical center, moves to the south by burgeoning semiconductor firms, and the arrival of a major biotechnology company.

Syntex Corporation, which had been founded in Mexico, opened a research lab in Stanford Industrial Park in 1964. Soaring on the popularity of the birth control pill it introduced that year, Syntex added production space. Carl Djerassi, principal developer of the pill, joined the Stanford chemistry faculty. Syntex research director Alejandro Zaffaroni in 1968 founded Alza Corporation, which offered skin patches and other new drug delivery methods.

NASA's Ames Research Center began origin-of-life research in 1964, creating "building blocks" of life and charting many steps in the chemical evolution of life. In 1965, launchings began of four spacecraft, the Pioneer 6 through 9 series, to circle the Sun and study solar wind and cosmic rays. In 1989, Pioneer 6 -- still operating -- became history's longest-lived spacecraft, continuing to send back data with an 8-watt Watkins-Johnson amplifier, a traveling-wave tube that was designed to last only three-plus years but instead was still operating after more than 20 years. Other Ames projects included Biosatellites 1, 2, and 3, which flew plants, insects, fertilized eggs, and a space ape known as Ham in orbit and returned them to Earth, testing the effects of weightlessness on living systems.

In contrast to tiny spacecraft traveling immense distances to explore space beyond Earth orbit, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center applies tremendous energies to pry open the secrets of tiny particles inside the atom. SLAC was founded in 1962 and in 1966 began research at its two-mile-long electron "gun" in the foothills west of Menlo Park. Large klystron tubes initially speeded the electron beams to energies of 20 billion volts by the time they struck research targets. By 1968, the first evidence was discovered for quarks, the smaller, more fundamental objects within the proton and neutron that are constituents of the atomic nucleus. Richard Taylor of SLAC and two MIT scientists, Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall, ultimately shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics for their quark work. Stanford University operates SLAC for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Stanford's medical school, a San Francisco fixture for many decades, moved in 1959 to the new Stanford Medical Center, straddling the line between Palo Alto and the university. Although some senior faculty members had bitterly opposed the move, it opened the way for more productive collaboration between faculty members in varied scientific fields. Physicians broke fresh ground with the help of new scientific instruments invented and developed at Stanford -- linear accelerators, lasers, computer programs, miniaturized instruments made possible by microelectronics.

As the 1960s unfolded, big news kept emerging from the medical center: the first open-heart surgery in 1960, initial "exports" of Stanford-developed linear accelerators for cancer treatment in late 1962, use of lasers to weld detached retinas (led by clinical faculty members Milton Flocks and Christian Zweng of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic), surgical cures of "blue baby" heart defects by Norman Shumway and colleagues, development by researcher Judith Pool of a much superior technique for extracting the blood fraction needed to prevent bleeding in hemophiliacs, installation of the medical school's first computing facility, and, on January 6, 1969, the first heart transplant in an adult patient in the United States, performed by Shumway, Edward Stinson, Eugene Dong, and colleagues.

Palo Alto and Stanford, partners since 1921 in operating a community hospital, went their separate ways in mid-1968 when the university bought out the city's share of their joint hospital. Though now at an end, the city's willingness to shoulder the rare municipal burden of owning a hospital had helped to create a high-ranked modern medical community.

Meanwhile, the 1960s had become the first great era of computers -- primarily large computers built to run on IBM software, their operation much enhanced by the disk drives being improved constantly at the San Jose laboratory.

On the industrial front, development of semiconductors was surging. After camping in Palo Alto for a time, Fairchild Semiconductor had made its permanent home in Mountain View. This marked the start of a movement to the south that at length shifted most semiconductor production to Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. That trend was accompanied by a lessening of Stanford University's influence in that aspect of microelectronics, at least for a time. On the whole, output gained momentum, not only in semiconductors but also in ancillary out-sourcing activities, such as printed circuits and crystal growing, and in products for the armed forces: microwave tubes, avionics, and advanced radars.

By 1966 the Midpeninsula was widely recognized as America's largest microelectronics concentration. Two years later, Ampex, which had plunged into consumer products, began to see storm clouds on the horizon.

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