Back in 1848, when James Marshall and John Sutter discovered gold west of Sacramento, it set off a mad rush that drew prospectors from Europe, China, North America and even Brazil. For these nervy gamblers, the get-rich formula was not a secret: You bought some flat pans and a pick axe, maybe a pistol, and you headed for the rivers and streams flowing from the Sierra Nevada foothills. Everybody knew where the gold lay, generally speaking.

Though many thousands of forty-niners gambled everything on the promise of unimaginable wealth near Sutter's Mill, only a few managed to reap the unimaginable bounty hyped in the countless newspaper stories and handbills sent around the globe. So what if most went bust? Those few winners started California on its way to becoming one of the world's richest economies.

Today, prospectors using petri dishes instead of gold pans have turned biotechnology and the life sciences into a 21st century gold rush - seeking cancer cures, space-age vaccines and diagnostic techniques that seem almost magical. The promise of vast individual wealth and regional economic strength again is luring investors and entrepreneurs. But unlike the California gold rush, this wealth isn't buried in the earth; it lies in the minds of geneticists, biologists, genome mappers, software wizards and others eager to have their brains sluiced for what many insist will be the treasure of the 21st century.

"The 19th century was characterized as the century of chemistry, and the 20th was the century of physics," explains Leroy Hood, president of the nonprofit Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle and one of the leading lights in the Washington biotechnology industry. "The 21st will be the century of biology and medicine. We believe that during this century, we will unlock their mysteries, transforming our understanding of the human body and discovering ways to predict, cure and even prevent disease."

But here's the catch: The gold in this rush is mobile. Today's treasure always is discovered in the heads of smart human beings and not the backwaters of the Feather River, which means that when a pharmaceutical company in suburban Boston offers enough money, a sought-after biologist takes his gold-filled mind to the East Coast. If a glamorous start-up company in San Diego can promise a good salary, profit sharing and state-of-the-art lab space, the two-legged treasure migrates south.

The result? A gold rush in reverse: Research hubs, states and cities with government support and perhaps stellar academic infrastructure cry out, "Gold! We're discovering gold!" and then do whatever they can to convince treasure-laden scientists to rush quickly to a new life, perhaps in a new company or locale, where the gold within them can be mined.

Washington, of course, wants desperately to keep its best biotech minds here, as well as to attract promising scientists from other regions. So it has created the Life Sciences Discovery Fund Authority, a state agency that soon will begin doling out money won from tobacco companies to promising biotech ventures. "Washington is fairly strong in the life sciences, but it historically has been very weak in terms of investment in life sciences," says Lee Huntsman, executive director of the fledgling agency and president emeritus of the University of Washington.

ISB's Hood, the world-renowned molecular biologist who created a DNA sequencer to map the human genome, is more blunt, pointing out that the University of Washington, in many ways the bedrock of the state's biotech hopes, "is very poorly supported by the state. What's remarkable is that the region has done as well as it has."