`21st-Century' Facility Is Bound For Seattle

In an era marked by the growing interdisciplinary nature of science, this new program will call on specialists from disparate fields such as physics, computer science, chemical engineering, and applied mathematics to tackle current problems in molecular biology. Their goal, in Hood's words, will be no less than to "develop the tools that are going to push us into the 21st century." Funded by a $12 million gift from William Gates III, founder and chairman of the Microsoft Corp. of nearby Redmond, Wash., the charter of the new department will be to develop techniques and instruments that further the study of fundamental problems of modern biology, such as DNA sequencing, DNA diagnostics, and gene mapping. 1. New DNA Diagnostics and Genetic Mapping Instrumentation. The group hopes to expand and automate the process whereby genes are mapped and genetic diseases characterized. 2. Automated DNA Sequencer. In 1986, Hood's lab developed the first of these instruments. Now his group is working on a second-generation machine that will be able to analyze DNA 20 times faster. 3. Biological Information Signal Processor. Hood's Caltech group has already developed this silicon chip, which uses the most rigorous algorithm for doing similarity searches in DNA data bases. They now plan to design a board with these chips and create the software necessary to do the rapid similarity analyses that will be essential for understanding the DNA sequences the department will be generating in the next few years. 4. Large-Scale DNA Sequencing Instrumentation. One of Hood's groups is in the process of sequencing the entire T cell receptor loci in both mouse and man, and currently has the two longest continuous human sequences that have ever been reported. This project will drive the development of new instrumentation that should be useful in the sequencing of the entire human genome. --S.L-JD. The department will not be large; an initial faculty of 12 (which may eventually grow to as many as 30) will place great emphasis on intimacy and interaction, while relying on students' individual projects to involve specialists from other departments at the university. The funds provided by Gates break down as follows: $3 million will finance the William Gates III Endowed Chair in Biomedical Sciences, held by Hood; $5.5 million will go for construction and equipment of new laboratories; $1.5 million for recruitment and early program support; and $2 million to establish an intellectual venture capital fund, which will provide faculty of the new department with monies to test new ideas in their most preliminary stages, before enough data have been gathered to submit for a peer-review grant. One such project is the development of a high-density oligonucleotide chip to carry out DNA sequencing comparisons, an extremely challenging project that will involve molecular biology, synthetic organic chemistry, and innovative engineering. Often referred to as the whiz kid of the software industry, the 36-year-old Gates has a personal net worth of more than $4 billion--one of the 25 largest personal fortunes in the world, according to a New York Times Magazine report last year. No wonder, then, that the local entrepreneur has headed the list of potential donors at the University of Washington. But it took a chance meeting between Gates and one of Hood's University of Washington colleagues at a football game to get Gates interested in a longtime dream of Hood's that he had proposed to a number of universities, including Washington--a department in molecular biotechnology. Learning that the right chord might have been struck with Gates, Philip Fialkow, dean of the Washington School of Medicine, arranged for Hood to come to the school for a series of lectures--all of which Gates attended. "We immediately hit it off," recalls Hood. "We met for dinner and discussed what I thought would be necessary resources for the kind of department I wanted to create, and negotiated what turned out to be [Gates's] gift." A Brilliant Career Hood's career at Caltech has been marked by ground-breaking work on such projects as the DNA synthesizer, the peptide synthesizer (subsequently used to synthesize and characterize all 99 residues of the HIV protease), the first gas phase protein sequenator (used to sequence interferon, erythropoietin, the interleukins, and the colony stimulating factors), and the programmable hexagonal array pulseotelemetric pheresis instrument, currently marketed by Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc. of Hercules, Calif. For the past three years Hood has also headed the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Molecular Biotechnology at Caltech. Seven of the 10 senior faculty at the center will be moving to Washington, and Hood is hopeful that NSF will approve his request to have the center designation move to Washington with them. Hood stresses that the departmental status his program will have at Washington, something it never had at Caltech, will legitimize the faculty appointment system and will enable him to recruit more senior people from a variety of fields and, most important, to expand the teaching component of the center. Paul Jennings, vice president and provost at Caltech, says that while the institute regrets losing Hood, it is going to assist him in the "orderly transfer" of his program. "It is best for both the program itself and the science involved to keep the center as an entity," Jennings says. Moreover, he says, the kind of academic department Hood plans would not have been possible at Caltech. "We could have possibly appointed one or two faculty members, but not a whole department," Jennings explains. "That represents too high a concentration of resources for a school as small as Caltech." Both Hood and Fialkow view the fact that the new program will have departmental status as being critical to its success. The department's students are the key to fostering new and unlikely collaborations between department faculty and other scientific faculty members. "The students will be bridges between biology and these other disciplines," says Hood. Hybrid Program Hood and Fialkow plan a hybrid Ph.D. program, in which a graduate student will study and define a leading-edge problem in biology and then bring in another discipline, such as computer science or chemical engineering, to develop a tool to solve the problem. Such a project would require double mentors; faculty members from different departments, who would very likely never have interacted on their own, will have to devise a curriculum for the student, oversee the student's progress--in short, have to become involved with each other. "My prediction would be that after these two faculty members mentor the first Ph.D. student they will continue to work together, whether or not they have another student. They will have been exposed to each other, learned each other's language, and been excited by each other," says Fialkow. To help foster these interdisciplinary interactions, the physical layout of the new department is being designed with, as Hood puts it, "a large collision coefficient for the people with each other." Open laboratories with as few walls as possible and the juxtaposition of unlikely neighbors--a molecular biologist and a computer scientist both interested in large-scale DNA sequencing, for instance--should promote more spontaneous conversations. Maynard Olson, a chemist from Washington University in St. Louis who will be joining Hood's new senior faculty this summer, believes that such attention to detail could be important. "I think that it will make a lot of difference to have these people in the next lab versus several buildings away," he says. "When you don't know what you are doing, as is the case [on the leading edge of science], serendipity plays a larger role, and discussions over coffee can be very critical." Although Hood readily acknowledges that the University of Washington is not among the top five research universities in the U.S., he claims that fact is one of the elements that appeals to him about the site. "It would be very hard to persuade the Stanfords, Caltechs, and MITs to build the kind of department I have in mind," he says--and he knows, because he has shopped the program, unsuccessfully, in the past. "They are already very well off, and aren't going to make major perturbations to bring in new opportunities. It is the universities that really have a major commitment to improving themselves that are willing to take these chances." Fialkow says that convincing Hood--and even himself--that Washington would provide the right environment for the project was one of the biggest problems to be surmounted in piecing together the plan. The university has a strong history of breaking new interdisciplinary ground, with a center for neurosignaling, a center for molecular medicine, and even a molecular medicine training program, in which an individual in a clinical field can take a sabbatical to learn basic techniques in the laboratory before returning to his or her clinical studies. But the most tangible way Fialkow was able to demonstrate the school's commitment to Hood's new program was through a medical school executive committee meeting, during which the chairpersons of all the school's departments voted unanimously to deny their own programs much-needed spatial resources in favor of the new department. "At UCLA, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley Labs we didn't have that kind of reception," notes Hood. Olson has also experienced what he terms as prejudice from "disciplinary purists" who feel that working on technical or methodological problems is not "real biology." What molecular biology sorely needs, he says, is an injection of new ideas from other fields. "The history of science does not favor the idea that any field is strong enough to develop the degree of intellectual isolation which characterizes current molecular biology," he says. "The scale with which the work is done in a molecular biology lab--the way things are pipetted from one place to another and then centrifuged, for example--has changed very little over the past 20 years. "But during this time there has been a spectacular progress in many areas of technology. You don't find this parochial view in physics or chemistry, where people understand that if you want to learn more about molecules or nuclei or whatever, you need better methods." New interdisciplinary efforts, such as the one he and Hood will be pioneering at Washington this summer, Olson says, are the answer: "This isolation has to be broken down. Molecular biology doesn't take any significant advantage of all the revolutionary changes in materials science, microengineering, and laser spectroscopy; and the use of computers is pretty primitive. So there are many challenges." Susan L-J Dickinson is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

`21st-Century' Facility Is Bound For Seattle

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