Florida State U. Opens Chemistry Building at Center of Donation Dispute

On Friday Florida State University formally opened a new $72-million, 168,000-square-foot chemistry building that will house some 250 researchers. The architects were O’Brien/Atkins, of Durham, N.C.

The five-story, red-brick building includes three floors of laboratories designed to be flexible enough to accommodate changing research needs, as well as one floor devoted to synthetic organic chemistry and one floor that mixes labs with a 160-seat lecture hall. The labs have a total of 145 fume hoods, according to a university news release. A photo gallery is available on the Tallahassee Democrat’s Web site.

Fund raising for the building took an unusual turn when Robert A. Holton, a chemistry professor who invented the anti-cancer drug Taxol, made a donation to the project but then demanded that the gift be returned because the focus of the building had changed. A state judge ordered the university to give back $11-million of the donation that had come from the professor’s foundation, plus interest, but said the university could spend $18.5-million from the professor’s lab account, which she determined was money the university controlled (The Chronicle, September 8, 2006).