01/27/2005

UC Berkeley celebrates a construction milestone

For the researchers eager to move into the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility, the donors who support a campus vision for health sciences research, and the construction team that turns that support into a reality, a celebration on January 27 offered the chance to celebrate major progress on the building and look ahead to the scientific discoveries sure to come once construction is completed in 2006.

Graham Fleming, Robert Tjian, and Robert Birgeneau sign a commemorative ribbon at the recent Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility event.
Photo by Peg Skorpinski.

Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), and the campuss Health Sciences Initiative hosted the event in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building (next to the Stanley site). More than 120 guests enjoyed speakers, research posters, refreshments, and student-guided tours to nearby Evans Hall for a bird's eye view of the Stanley construction site from a 10th-floor balcony.

The purpose of the event was to celebrate the recent topping-off of the 11-story structure. In November, the last piece of structural steel was hoisted into place on top of Stanley, marking a major milestone in the construction of a building that is integral to the growth of health sciences at UC Berkeley.

The new building will house approximately 40 research laboratories for QB3 faculty affiliates, and specialized core research support facilities including a Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, tissue engineering facility, specialized optics suite, and NMR facilities featuring 13 NMRs. The facility will also provide an administrative home for the Department of Bioengineering and QB3, a partnership between the state of California, the UC campuses at Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, private companies, and venture capital.

We are working to foster research at the interface between disciplines, where the most exciting scientific challenges relating to human health reside," said Graham Fleming, director of QB3 at UC Berkeley and director for the Physical Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Our research in the Stanley facility will lead to a deeper understanding of how proteins, molecules, and cells work, and point us in the right direction to understand, prevent, and treat disease."

Built on the site of the former Stanley Virus Lab, the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility is named in honor of the late UC Berkeley Professor and Nobel Laureate Wendell Meredith Stanley (1904-1971). In 1946, Stanley was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on the tobacco mosaic virus, which transformed the study of viruses as large molecules. In 1954, Stanley made another biochemical breakthrough by crystallizing the polio virus for study; understanding the structure of the virus enabled researchers to develop a vaccine against it. Known as an innovative administrator, Stanley purposely combined two units (biochemistry and virology) to encourage the sharing of ideas, a precursor to the multidisciplinary research that will be taking place in the new Stanley Facility.

The Stanley Facility is unique in that it has been specifically designed to bring people together across traditional disciplines. For example, office space will be clustered not by specialty, but by cross-cutting research areas, and equipment used by researchers from different disciplines will reside in shared facilities rather than in individual labs.

Robert Tjian, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and faculty director of the Berkeley Health Sciences Initiative, said he looked forward to the work that would be done in the new Stanley facility, much of it the likely result of "serendipitous collisions" among faculty, students, and postdocs a serendipity the building is specifically designed to encourage."

Observed Chancellor Birgeneau, "While I hope all universities will always have a place for the lonely genius who sits alone in her office solving great problems, the truth is that very few of todays problems will be solved that way."

View photos from the January 27, 2005, Topping-off Celebration

Related links

Stanley Fact Sheet
Health Sciences Initiative
Department of Bioengineering