BERKELEY - Looking out at the construction site that will someday be the eight-story, $162 million Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility at UC Berkeley, Gov. Gray Davis said, "If we build it, they will come."

"They" are the world-class scientists and engineers Davis hopes to lure to Berkeley with the state-of-the-art structure scheduled for completion in 2006. "We've already got eight from Yale and M.I.T., and it isn't even built yet," Davis said.

Davis was in Berkeley on Friday for the official groundbreaking ceremony. He, UC President Richard Atkinson and Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl took turns praising the project, which Davis predicted will turn Berkeley into "a second Silicon Valley."

The Stanley Facility will be the second-largest building on campus. Like the old Stanley Hall which it replaces, it is named after Berkeley's second Nobel laureate, the late chemistry professor Wendell Stanley. Stanley's children were in the audience Friday.

The building will be the hub of biomedical and bioengineering research and teaching at Berkeley, putting under one roof both the California Institute for Qualitative Biomedical Research - a joint program of the UC Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Cruz campuses -- and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

"The whole building has been designed to maximize day-to-day serendipitous encounters between scientists," said Robert Tijan, professor of molecular and cell biology, "We don't want more of the same; we want to create new disciplines."

Davis, Atkinson and the other VIPs watched, goggle-eyed, as the scientists gave them a tour of some of their cutting-edge projects: DNA-sensing microchips, painless microscopic syringes, and nano-devices that can track firefighters in a smoke-filled building or experimental drugs as they bond with individual cells.

Davis was especially fascinated by the Robo-Fly On The Wall, a penny-sized flying robot equipped with video camera, detector and a tiny radio to transmit its findings back to home base.

"Wow!" said the governor. "This is real Buck Rogers stuff."

"Yes," said James Demmer, chief scientist for CITRIS. "But think of the implications for personal privacy. It's wonderful and frightening at the same time."