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"We're being bold, and it's a little scary," says Robert Tjian '71. "It's an experiment. Can we really coordinate physicists, the engineers, and the biologists and the chemists in a productive way?" Tjian, who teaches molecular and cell biology at Cal, is talking about the Health Sciences Initiative, a $500-million attempt to bring together scientists from different disciplines to attack some of medicine's toughest problems. The aim of the initiative is to create collaborating teams that will design better artificial tissue and joints, devise new cancer treatments, refine computer imaging of the living brain, improve diagnostic tests, and make sense of the mass of data coming out of various genome projects. The initiative will involve as many as 400 Cal researchers from an array of campus units: the biological sciences, especially molecular and cell biology; the School of Public Heath; the physical sciences, including engineering, physics, and chemistry; and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. "This is the most ambitious reorganization that I know of, anywhere," says Tjian, the initiative's most visible proponent. "It's the natural extension of the reorganization of the biological sciences in the 1980s." he says. "The reasons are somewhat different, but the net result is the same: we end up with a much more interdisciplinary effort. We're setting the national agenda for the next century." To house the researchers, Berkeley plans to replace two buildings at the east and west ends of the campus: Stanley Hall will be replaced by a larger facility with a focus on molecular engineering and structural biology; and a building housing a new neuroscience institute and units focusing on cancer and infectious diseases will replace Warren Hall, the present home of the School of Public Health. The buildings will cost $300 million, and an additional $200 million will be spent to hire new faculty, equip the labs, and finance basic research. The campus has already raised $105 million in private and public funds, of which $50 million--the largest gift Cal has ever received--came this summer from an anonymous donor. There are two main thrusts behind the initiative, which has been in the planning stage since the early 1990s: to keep Berkeley competitive in basic research; and to find ways to apply techniques now being developed in the physical sciences--such as non-invasive imaging and nanotechnology--to biology and health sciences. Tjian, who heads the Chancellor's Advisory Council on the biological sciences, says the seed of the initiative was planted seven years ago, when professors Corey Goodman and Carla Shatz suggested that Berkeley create a new center for neuroscience. They proposed a program that would run the gamut from imaging the brain to studying its molecular structure, and draw faculty from psychology, molecular and cell biology, integrative biology, vision science, and computer science. The proposal soon reached Tjian, who had succeeded Koshland as chair of the advisory council in 1992. "As chairman, my job is always to be thinking five or ten years ahead," he says, "trying to anticipate what we need to do to maintain our edge." Also, he says, "I'm not afraid of trying things that are new or untested." As the council members studied the neuroscience proposal, they started to think big. "We realized we should be looking at integration across many fields--for all of the biological sciences," Tjian says. "And that's what led to the Health Sciences Initiative." To put the proposed reorganization in perspective, it might help to recall the last one, which Daniel Koshland '41 led in the 1980s. A major realignment of the biological sciences, it was sparked by three things: Cal was no longer attracting the brightest young faculty; its life science buildings were antiquated (older than San Quentin, as Koshland liked to point out); and, most importantly, recombinant DNA technology had arrived with a bang. "DNA work wasn't totally new," says Koshland, "but it became an enormously powerful tool." As scientists in such traditional departments as zoology, botany, and biochemistry started to use similar DNA-based techniques, he says, consolidating the campus's 17 life sciences departments made sense. The reorganization involved 200 faculty members and was part of the campus's greatest fundraising effort to date, the $469-million Keeping the Promise campaign. Two new biology buildings were a visible result: the Life Sciences Addition and the Genetics and Plant Biology Building. And Berkeley wound up reinventing the biological sciences by merging such fields as anatomy, physiology, microbiology, and zoology into three "integrative" departments--a model adopted by universities around the world. "When we first reorganized biology, we became one of the most attractive places for graduate students to come," says Tjian. "And we enjoyed that for many years. Now we're getting much more competition from other places like Harvard Medical School and Stanford." Tjian argues that for Berkeley to remain competitive, the campus must now take an even bigger leap and combine its resources and intellectual power in an integrated framework. To hire good people in bioinformatics, for example, Cal needs an interdisciplinary program. "If we hire bioinformatics specialists into a classical biology or molecular biology department," he says, "they'll be isolated, they won't have colleagues, and we might lose a tremendous opportunity." Unlike the 1980s reorganization, the Health Sciences Initiative focuses on concrete applications. "There isn't one single scientific impetus like DNA behind the present reorganization," says Tjian, "but I would maintain that it's still molecular biology that is pushing the boundaries." As possible areas of study, he cites the genome structure; analyzing huge numbers of complex molecules, which he calls the extension of the recombinant DNA revolution; sequencing the entire genomes of different organisms--yeast, bacteria, c. elegans, drosophila, and eventually mice and humans. Infectious disease specialist Eva Harris, Ph.D. '93, who left UCSF to join the School of Public Health, is happy to be in the thick of things. "Personally, it's great to hear basic research mentioned in the same breath as applications," she says. "I enjoy seeing people from materials science and chemistry reaching out to the medical sciences to solve problems of disease or prosthetics." On the overall move toward greater integration, Harris says: "I definitely think it's the way to go. I'm excited that the campus is moving in that direction." Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton are also launching interdisciplinary projects to join physical and biomedical sciences, but Berkeley's initiative is the most far-reaching of all--and integrating faculty from such disparate groups as the School of Public Health and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab could be a challenge. "Each of those is a major unit, with its own culture and principles and ideas," says Tjian. "And we're talking about building buildings where all the money is going to come in collectively to these programs; where the faculty will be housed in what I would call 'mixed' neighborhoods, with physicists and biochemists right next door to each other. "I think it helps that we did the reorganization in the 1980s," says Tjian. "There's a whole generation of faculty at Berkeley that is used to having change every decade or so. The realignments make sense when you're in fields that are moving incredibly fast. " Some doubts may be allayed by the results of such related interdisciplinary efforts as last year's successful establishment of the new Berkeley-UCSF Department of Bioengineering. And Berkeley's move toward integration has already given the MCB department a better recruiting record than the football coach's. Says Tjian: "In the last four years or so, I can't recall a junior faculty we made an offer to who turned us down; the score is something like 18 out of 18." For now, much of the initiative exists only in the minds of its proponents. The big new buildings are four or five years down the road, architects haven't been picked yet, and the campus has to raise millions of dollars for construction. But Tjian says the initiative is less about bricks and mortar than a new interaction on campus--he calls it a "lab without walls"--that will persuade people and departments to pool their efforts. Some segments of each discipline will probably be unhappy at what they see as a dilution of their field, he says. "On the other hand, there will be so many great discoveries that will come out of the convergence of these fields, I think it will more than make up for it." |
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