In April 1971 the first UW–Parkside student government was elected, and in October that year the State Legislature approved a bill to merge the four-campus University of Wisconsin with the Wisconsin State Universities, creating the University of Wisconsin System. The move had a profound effect on the growth of the UW–Parkside campus. In December 1971, three UW–Parkside researchers, Eugene Goodman, Ben Greenebaum, Michael Marron, received a United States Navy grant to study the effects of a proposed Navy communications system, Project Sanguine, on the cells of slime mold. Since then, the three researchers and others have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in further grants to study the effects of the communication system on living organisms.