The race is on to create an economic engine for the early 21st century that matches information technology's contribution to the late 20th. Some of the smart money is betting on the emerging field of "life sciences" - biotechnology, medicine and related studies of living things.

The race is also on to be a geographic focal point of that movement, which is likely to transform medicine and much else, probably for the better. But can there be a Silicon Valley of life sciences?

The lessons of the valley's rise, including a culture of entrepreneurism and close ties between academia and business, have not been lost on the rest of the world.

Other regions may never match the valley's prominence in information technology, but leadership in the new era may well be up for grabs - even though no single region is likely to have the dominance the valley enjoyed for so long.

The possibility of being a contender is enough. It's why Michigan, the capital of what once was derisively called the "Rust Belt," is spending big money to create a "Life Sciences Corridor," spanning research institutions from Grand Rapids to Detroit.

The project has won funding from an unusual source - a portion of the state's share of the lawsuit settlement with the tobacco industry. A Republican governor and legislature allocated $50 million a year for 20 years to the life-sciences corridor.

"No other state is doing this," said Lee Bollinger, president of the University of Michigan, who helped persuade state leaders to invest the tobacco money so creatively.

Bollinger's own institution expects to invest about $700 million in the next few years to create a Life Sciences Institute and related programs. A key aim of the project is to commercialize the discoveries to help create and nurture thriving businesses in the state.

Maybe no other state is using the blood money from the tobacco settlement for such purposes, but other states are seeing a pot of gold in life sciences and investing accordingly. In California and the Bay Area, for example, major research universities such as Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco have all launched life-sciences initiatives or are expanding current ones.

They have some built-in advantages, including the presence of many homegrown biotech companies - plus the technology industries and enterpreneurial fervor that spawned Silicon Valley's recent booms. Life-science research relies to a staggering degree on the collecting, massaging and sharing of information. In some respects, it's as much about computers as biology.

The Boston area has many of those same advantages. So do research centers in other parts of the United States and around the world.

Michigan's academic and political leaders are aware of the state's drawbacks, notably its citizens' longstanding aversion to business risk-taking - a far cry from the state's status in the early part of the 20th century, when Michigan was an entrepreneurial hotbed that seeded the automobile industry. As the Detroit News reported recently, Michigan has been the birthplace of useful biotech-related inventions that ultimately were commercialized elsewhere.

That's not a new phenomenon, either. Some of the technology and infrastructure that became the modern Internet started in Michigan. You'd never know that based on what happened afterward.

But the state's leaders think they're on the right track this time. They think they can help shift attitudes if they create the right conditions.

Great centers of bio-medicine will only exist "where there is substantial commercial activity," said Bollinger. But commercial activity "comes where the great science is."

Michigan has at least one advantage that the coasts can't match. The state boasts a dramatically lower cost of living, plus a lifestyle that many people find more appealing than what they encounter on the coasts or in big cities. Ann Arbor, where I spent a year in the 1980s on a fellowship at the university, combines small-city charms with the cultural advantages of an urban center.

A university is more than science. Liberal arts and values co-exist with research and other ideas.

Encouragingly, Michigan's life-sciences project goes beyond research, development and the spawning of an industry. Bollinger and his colleagues have insisted that ethics and other academic disciplines be part of the mix.

"You do the basic science, but you have to integrate the humanities and professional schools," he said.

"We missed that with physics," Bollinger said, referring in part to the development of nuclear technology in an era when military and business imperatives overwhelmed other considerations. "Let's not miss it this time."