Profession Notes

Flush with an $80 million gift from an anonymous donor, three New York institutions are creating a joint biology program emphasizing chemistry, computation, and cancer. The institutions, which together will contribute another $80 million, are Cornell University (including its Weill Medical College), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), and Rockefeller University. Officials announced the Tri-Institutional Research Program announced on June 27 at a ceremony capped by a kiss between brothers David and Laurance Rockefeller, honorary chairmen of the boards of Rockefeller University and MSKCC, respectively. Presidents of the three institutions also spoke. Cornell's Hunter Rawlings described its Ithaca campus as offering "an ideal facility for obtaining atom-by-atom pictures of biological molecules." Noting that "we are very different kinds of institutions," MSKCC's Harold Varmus said that the joint program would have "all the components required to exploit new developments in biology." And Rockefeller's Arnold Levine predicted, "This is the beginning of what ...