Caltech Constructs A Center For 'Hare-Brained' Research

PASADENA, CALIF.—Harry Gray can walk the 30 feet or so from his third-floor office at the California Institute of Technology and look out the window at a gigantic hole in the ground. Next to it is a huge mound of dirt covered with opaque plastic. The dirt, taken from the hole, will eventually be used for backfill, and the mound is affectionately called “Mount Beckman” after its benefactor, Arnold Beckman. Gray walks to the window frequently and happily; he is looking at the construction site for his nascent empire—a novel, possibly daring experiment in the ability of universities to support innovative and potentially commercial science. Although multidisciplinary research is something of a buzzword around campuses these days, Caltech’s budding Beckman Institute offers a new and unprecedented twist on the basic idea. The institute is designed to marry the fields of chemistry and biology, pushing them into working together to develop new methods and instruments. But unlike other multidisciplinary centers with a permanent oore of researchers, the institute will provide only temporary homes for scientists and students, allowing them to carry out specific experiments. If the experiments are too high-risk to get funding from government agencies—and many will be—the institute has an endowment to provide seed money. When their experinients are ended, the researchers, most of them Caltech faculty will vacate the premises and make room for other groups. Even Gray, the director of the facility, will have to keep some of his research alive here on campus. In the meantime, individual scientists who normally see each other only for lunch at Caltech’s fabled Athenaeum, will be gently forced into a convivial critical mass, with the hope that they will inteliectually nourish each other. Outside scholars will be invited in periodically to stir the soup. “We would like to be facilitators of joint research, to get people together from different divisions of Caltech—engineers together with chemists, chemists together with biologists,” explains Gray, who also holds a Caltech chair in chemistry endowed by Arnold Beckman, the industrialist who put $50 million into the project. No venture has ever quite done it this way before. Even the sister Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, now just getting started, has taken a more conservative approach, housing a permanent group of multidisciplinary researchers to explore the cognitive sciences. In fact, Caltech’s bold new venture has even strayed far from Beckman’s original conception. The philanthropist first had the idea for the institute hack in the early 1980s. At the time, the burgeoning biotechnology industry was receiving widespread publicity, and Beckman feared that the lure of instant riches might lead to a brain drain from universities—and ethical dilemmas for those who stayed. “I investigated to see how universities handle patentable ideas, and found the situation just chaotic,” he recalls. Derailed Scheme Beckman thought the solution to the various problems might be an institute designed strictly for applied research. It would function as a one-stop innovation center, complete with top-notch patent attorneys and licensing experts. But the scheme was derailed by an accident of geography. Beckman lives in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, and one of his friends is Donald Bren, president of the Irvine Company, the largest landowner in the county. Bren, who had already donated land to the University of California for its Irvine campus, agreed to give Beckman adjacent land for a 100,000-square-foot laboratory—along with enough money sufficient to keep the laboratory going. Beckman was prepared to ante up for the cost of the facility itself. The problem was that Beckman wanted a prestigious research university to run the center—and UC-Irvine, he thought, was not of sufficient stature. So he turned to Caltech, where he had served on the faculty. Caltech declined because it did not want to run a research facility 50 miles away on an- other university’s campus. “What to do? Well, we batted it around and we finally broke the matter up into two parts; one we called the ‘soft science,’ the other we called the ‘hard science,’ Beckman says. The “hard” science was the innovative technology part; the “soft” was an exploration of the ethics and morality involved in science and technology. Beckman decided that the best solution was two separate institutes. So in partnership with Bren, he built an office and conference center for the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering at UC-Irvine to handle the theoretical and philosophical aspects. Newly completed, the handsome building atop a hill on the edge of the UCI campus now houses Beckman’s own office. The center does not have its own faculty, although some academy staffers are being transferred to Irvine (there was apparently no lack of volunteers). But to keep it isolated from the whims of Washington, Beckman and Bren set up an independent corporation to operate the center. Old Friends At the same time, Beckman offered to build the hard science facilities on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. His first gift to the university was $40 million, conditional on Caltech’s raising $10 million from other sources. It did. Beckman and his wife Mabel then promised another $10 million if Caltech raised an equal amount for its general fund. It did that too. Satisfied, Beckman brought in his favorite architect and his preferred contractor, and named Gray to head the institute. The choice of director seemed obvious to both men, who axe old friends. “I’ve known Arnold Beckman for 20 years, and I started talking to him about this six or seven years ago,” Gray says. “I’ve also been involved with several projects with him, including a project here in the chemical synthesis lab that he and I developed together.” Caltech had the right to approve Beckman’s choice, but never got deeply involved in the decision. Why would Gray want to take on the huge responsibilities of running the new facility? One reason was that he saw the institute as a way of solving a major problem facing Caltech researchers, including his own research team. “Our group makes things; we make molecules,” he explains. “We’re faced with making very fancy measurements to get answers. We now go all over the world to make these measure- ments. We go to Brookhaven, we go to Texas, we go to Stanford. we go to wherever people have these fancy machines to make measurements.” The Beckman Institute, he hoped, would be so well equipped that Caltech’s scientists could get their work done at home. Another attraction was that after paying the bills, Beckman stepped into the shadows, leaving it entirely to Gray to decide what the institute would do. “That’s done deliberately,” Beckman explains. “I’m not sure Caltech would accept [interference] —outside of the fact they shouldn’t accept it. First, I don’t have an infrastructure set up here to monitor these things, and I don’t want to set one up. Second, I don’t have the competence to pass judgment on these things. I deliberately disassociate myself.” Given free rein, Gray revised Beckman’s plan for the institute after a series of discussions with Caltech researchers. He was, however, politic enough to include the industrialist in the deliberations. “Beckman helped us tremendously in getting rid of really bad ideas, of things we thought were reasonable to do but were really bad ideas,” Gray says. Still, nothing is left of Beckman’s original idea of an all-purpose innovation store—there will be no lawyers or licensing agents. (“Maybe it’s not lost forever,” Beckman says, “but it’s not in the present program.”) In Gray’s vision, the core of the Caltech institute’s research revolves around four of’ what the chemistry professor calls “resource centers.” The largest will be run by chemist Lee Hood and will be devoted to developing instruments for protein sequencing, along with peptide and nucleotide synthesis and sequencing. Gray and Hood believe that center could be very important in producing instruments for the international program to map the human genome. Hood will eventually have as many as 50 people at the institute, in addition to dozens more here. Making Molecules The second center, run by Caltech chemist Jack Beauchamp, will work on new mass spectrometer technology. Beauchamp anticipates having four or five researchers in his center. “Both of these resource centers are methods-oriented, in fact, they’re centered around developing new instruments that would impact a lot of people, not only around this campus but a lot of places,” says Gray. “It’s not limited to instrument development; there are other methodologies, for instance, making molecules, making polymers, making new solid state things.” The third center will be dedicated to materials chemistry, particularly in developing methods to synthesize new kinds of inorganic and organic substances. The fourth, Gray’s group, will be working with laser spectroscopy to develop procedures for looking at molecular structure and chemical reactions in time scales ranging from seconds to picoseconds “in a kind of user friendly way,” says Gray. The emphasis will be on biological material. At any given time, these last two centers will house 20 to 30 researchers, Gray says. Visiting Scholars In addition, the institute will have a center for visiting scholars, complete with offices and seminar rooms. “When we get these resource centers set up we expect they’ll be very attractive for people from other universities, from industry, from government labs, to come in and participate in the activities,” says Gray. The resulting plan, in other words, will be a cross between the way national laboratories run— with their facilities for guest researchers—and the conventional academic research framework. Eventually, the Beckman Institute will have 150 to 200 people at any one time, including a permanent staff of about 50 technicians and other support personnel. That’s the basic plan. But how will it actually work? For Caltech scientists, the new institute offers space and support for innovative, high-risk projects. The process would begin when a researcher has an idea that seems to fit into the general mission of the institute. He or she then applies to the institute’s research committee. If the committee agrees that the project is worth pursuing, the researcher is allocated the space needed. If he or she needs startup funds, the institute has a $35 million endowment for that purpose, which can supply about $2 million a year, according to administrator Jay Labinger. That will be enough to give out as much as $40,000 in seed money for any project, he says. The internal funding is one of the key elements of the new institute. “If we have enough of our own money in the activity, then we can go with a stronger case to the federal government and say ‘We don’t want all your money, we’ve shared the risk,’ “explains Gray. This fulfills another of Beckman’s goals: to at least partially insulate the researchers from the vicissitudes of federal funding. Should federal money tighten up, says Gray, “we still can keep something going that we believe in.” Since many of the projects will be high risk (Gray has been quoted as jokingly calling them “harebrained”), this funding ability of fers rare protection. One of those who will be taking advantage of this sanctuary will be chemist I Beauchamp, who is exploring new t methods to build mass spectro- scopes with greater sensitivity and I higher resolution than has ever I been possible before. Conventional methods of mass spectrometry achieve resolutions I on the order of one mass unit in 100,000. Using a new procedure called the Fourier Transform-Ion Cyclotron Resonance Spectroscopy (an outgrowth of experimental methods that Beauchamp developed at Harvard and Stanford in 1967), resolutions of one in 10 million are routine. And the chemist hopes to push the technology further—to one part in 100 billion. “It should .be possible to detect single ions and monitor them,” Beauchamp says. “At that resolution it is not surprising that particle physicists are interested in applications to, say, determine the mass of a neutrino.” The heart of the device, something he calls a “babytron,” nestles comfortably in the palm of a hand, so an entire instrument could easily fit in an ordinary laboratory, fulfilling the hope of eventual commercial potential. Certainly, the possible applications are myriad. “They range from studying chemical reactions in gases to determining properties of elementary particles,” Beauchamp says. “Our main objective will be the development of gas phase techniques for rapid automated determination of the amino acid sequence of as little as 10 femtomoles and perhaps even a single molecule of a protein.” His center may even be able to push the technology to determine the structure of minute quantities of DNA, RNA, and complex sugars. Beauchamp already has startup money from the institute, one of nine Caltech projects already approved for funding. Beauchamp’s project is a good example of the kind of high-risk enterprise the Beckman Institute will embrace. Says Gray: “That has tremendous potential, but it hasn’t been demonstrated yet. If he went right now to the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, they’d probably say, ‘We’d like to see some results first.’ We’ve already agreed to get him started; we have some space set aside for him, and money set aside for him. We’re going to let him see if that proves out, and if it does, that center could attract a very large amount of government funds at a later date.” The building that right now is a giant hole in the ground outside Gray’s window will encompass 160,000 square feet, making it the largest structure on the Pasadena campus. Not all of it will be the Beckman Institute per se; some of that space will be given to Caltech for routine use, including an extension to the library. But even the half of the building that will be devoted to research will dramatically increase the supply of that most precious of all commodities in a research university—space. Beauchamp says the new building will increase the amount of space he has available by 50%. “My group can breathe again,” he says. Everyone hopes to be able to move in by the spring of 1990. By that time the laboratories will be booked solid—and Gray laments that Caltech’s faculty already has produced more good ideas than there will be space to accommodate them. “We’re going to be space-limited rather quickly,” he says. “The only way to do new things is to quickly get something done and get those people out and put something else in. Will the innovative revolvingdoor concept of doing science pay off? Beckman and Gray certainly hope so, if only because both of them have expended so much time and effort in its planning. As Beckman once told Gray, “If I’d known how much trouble it would be to give my money away in a responsible fashion, maybe I wouldn’t have made it.” Joel N. Shurkin is a science writer based at Stanford University.

Caltech Constructs A Center For 'Hare-Brained' Research

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Joel Shurkin

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December 1988

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Caltech Constructs A Center For 'Hare-Brained' Research

Become a Member of

Meet the Author

Joel Shurkin

Published In

December 1988

Related Research Resources

How Do Embryos Know How Fast to Develop

Research Resources

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Become a PCR Pro

Embracing Polypharmacology for Multipurpose Drug Targeting

Genetic Insights Break Infectious Pathogen Barriers

Navigating Cold Storage Solutions

Products

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