Stanford University will use a $150 million gift from Netscape founder Jim Clark to build a top-notch bioengineering center on campus.

The San Jose Mercury News reports the new center -- called the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences -- will bring together researchers from medical, chemistry and engineering fields to fight disease and disability.

Stanford's bioengineering program, called Bio-X, will cost between $200 million and $250 million. The center will be 225,000 square feet and will have room for about 400 scientists and 50 professors.

The gift of stock also will endow professorships, buy equipment, and fund graduate fellowships, the Mercury News reports.

Provost John Hennessy told the newspaper the size of the gift came as a surprise, but that it allows the university to break ground next year.

Hennessy and Clark taught together in Stanford's engineering department in the early 1980s.

Clark taught at the school from 1979 to 1982. While at Stanford, he invented the "geometry engine" chip and used it to form the Silicon Graphics company in 1981. He left Silicon Graphics in 1994 to form Netscape with Marc Andreessen. The former professor is now a billionaire several times over.

His $150 million stock gift is second in size only to Stanford's founding grant.

Clark told the Mercury News he gave the money to Stanford because it is "one of the few places in the world where there's enough critical mass in chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine that if you sprinkle enough fertilizer on it, something's going to come of it."

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