A Newsletter for the Neighbors of the University of California, Berkeley

New Stanley Hall is no silo

An artist’s rendering of the new Stanley Hall, future hub for work in the bioengineering and biosciences, with a grand plaza facing Mining Circle.

By Janet Huseby

The science lab of the future will look much like any other: beakers and test tubes, stoppered jars and strange liquids, computer screens and blue-jeaned grad students. But at UC Berkeley, chemists, biologists, physicists and engineers will no longer cluster around separate water coolers. Instead, they will share coolers, coffee, facilities, and ideas.

Over the past five years UC Berkeley scientists of all stripes, once firmly ensconced in their own separate “silos,” have begun collaborating to solve some of the pressing problems of our time. They’ve worked at unraveling the genome, advancing imaging technology, and understanding Alzheimer’s, cancers, and environmental threats. “It’s been a real cultural merging,” says Susan Marqusee, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology.

UC Berkeley launched the Health Sciences Initiative (HSI) in 1999 to bring together researchers, facilities, and laboratories in a way that would maximize scientists’ ability to collaborate and share the latest technology. Under the new initiative, two seismically unsafe buildings slated for upgrade — Stanley and Warren halls — are being rebuilt. In their place will be new buildings designed specifically to foster and encourage the collaboration essential for the “new science.”

Work on the first new building is now underway. In March, demolition began on old Stanley Hall, rated seismically poor. Excavation is scheduled to begin in May and will continue through the summer. Late in the fall, the first above-ground signs of the new $162.3 million Stanley Hall should begin to appear. The building is scheduled for completion in 2006.

" We want to spark new ideas,” says Marqusee, who serves as associate director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, QB3. Much of the research in Stanley Hall will be by scientists working under the umbrella of this state initiative. As a future faculty resident of the building, Marqusee met with architects to discuss ways to enhance interactions between different labs. They considered everything from traffic patterns to elevator placement. The facility, as a result, is very different from the traditional single-department academic building.

The new Stanley Hall will have “neighborhoods” comprised of four to five labs from different disciplines that will share some equipment, computational facilities, and common areas such as reading and journal rooms.

The building will house 40 principal investigators, professors and their lab assistants, from at least four different departments: bioengineering, physics, molecular and cell biology, and chemistry. It will also house the largest nuclear magnetic resonance imaging facility in Northern California.

Among those scientists who are anticipated to relocate to the new building are:

• Carlos Bustamante, professor of physics and of molecular and cell biology, who applies cutting-edge technologies to look at the behavior of single molecules. Among his many interests are tiny biological machines inside the cell that copy DNA and read the genetic code to construct proteins;
• Steven Brenner, assistant professor in plant and microbial biology who uses computational methods to probe the information within genome sequences;
• John Kuriyan, professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry, whose X-ray crystallography work has been key to understanding drug therapy in leukemia;
• Luke Lee, assistant professor in bioengineering, who is working on miniaturized biochips that will make it possible to diagnose diseases at home;
• Susan Marqusee, professor of molecular and cell biology, who studies the “protein folding problem,” which can result in illnesses such as mad cow disease; and
• Alex Pines, a pioneer in the advancement of theory and experiment in magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

For information about the QB3 Institute, visit www.qb3.org. For information on the construction at Stanley Hall, call Capital Projects at UC Berkeley (510) 643-4793.

About the Office of Community Relations | Berkeley and the East Bay | Cal in the Community
Cal Neighbors | FAQs | What's New | Community Relations Home | UCB Home