Cornell President Hunter Rawlings and Provost Biddy Martin have announced the largest single scientific effort in the history of Cornell: the New Life Sciences Initiative, a campuswide program involving investments of up to $500 million, that will forever change the way life-science research is conducted and taught at the university. The initiative will be the largest fund-raising campaign for a single project ever attempted by Cornell.
At an April 30 reception in Lincoln Hall, the president said the initiative will engage "the most broadly respected faculty in
the country" in what Rawlings predicted would be "great research, great teaching and great outreach" in all aspects of the life sciences. Key
to the huge program of discovery and education is the integration of life sciences with physical, engineering and computational sciences.
Building on the success of the Cornell Genomics Initiative (CGI), the new initiative will involve seven colleges, several hundred faculty and up to 60 departments in a comprehensive program of interdisciplinary research and education. Also participating are the university's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) at Cornell and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS).
The initiative will support at least 50 new faculty hires, in addition to two dozen already hired, broaden undergraduate education in the life sciences and create as many as 100 new graduate fellowships, and support the building of several facilities, including the new Life Science Technology Building, new construction in the Baker Hall/Olin Laboratory/Clark Hall precinct, Duffield Hall and significant laboratory renovations in existing buildings on campus.
Rawlings credited Provost Martin with overseeing organization of the new initiative and noted that he and the provost will enlist faculty members in securing resources, of which $100 million already are committed.
So immersed was the provost in developing the new program, she said, "that I have changed my name to Bio Martin." She said that thanks to CGI, "collaborations across disciplines are splendid, and many outstanding [faculty-researcher] appointments have been made. But a lot of hard work is yet to be done."
The provost said three "assumptions" are integral to the New Life Sciences Initiative. First, "the work must be cross-disciplinary and involve large teams of researchers." The second assumption "is that no one species takes precedence," Martin said, referring to mice, fruit flies, plants, humans and all other organisms upon which life-sciences research is based. Third, the provost stipulated, the ethical, legal and social issues of life-sciences research and its application will be addressed and taken seriously both by specialists in those fields and by all scientific researchers in the new Cornell program.
Inge Reichenbach, vice president for alumni affairs and development, told the assembled faculty members that she saw two
main challenges. "This will be the largest fund-raising campaign for a single project we have ever undertaken," Reichenbach said,
predicting that the effort would continue for at least five years. "Also, genomics and life sciences are not exactly household words. We have a lot
of educating to do, to get people to care about this, and we will have to work together."
Critique by a national panel
Although the provost's office will control the coordination of the campuswide life-sciences effort, the Genomics Task Force, which spearheaded CGI's Phase I, will continue to have major responsibility for an expanded Phase II, which will form the major part of the new initiative. To help evaluate the program, the administration has created an external review board composed of five of the nation's leading scientists who will visit Cornell occasionally to validate and critique the initiative.
Charles Aquadro, professor of molecular biology and genetics, who was a founding member of CGI, said, "The New Life Sciences Initiative is a commitment to and a statement of the success of Phase I. Its particular approach and style of breaking out of the department mold by getting groups of faculty with common interests and goals from across campus to work together, succeeded well."
Indeed, the interdisciplinary research programs supported by the initiative will be continue to be faculty-driven, emphasized
Kraig Adler, vice provost for life sciences, who will have much of the day-to-day responsibility for the initiative. "These are research areas
in which we feel we have an opportunity to be real leaders, or in cases where we are already the leaders, it is important to make these
investments to remain ahead," he said.
Added Aquadro: "The initiative will highlight and enhance the particular strengths of Cornell in the life and related sciences. We
are trying to make it possible for students and faculty alike to explore and move up and down the continuum of disciplines as a
particular biological question requires."
The largest segments of the new initiative's research programs are the focus groups under the five-year-old CGI, which was entering its second phase as the broader program was created. Steven Tanksley, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Plant Breeding who is chairman of the Genomics Intitiative Task Force, noted that the genomics program "is going ahead in full force more or less as proposed in Phase II." The benefit of the new umbrella, he said, is that it will enable integration of the eight genomics research focus areas with other areas previously not represented.
CGI, said Stephen Kresovich, professor of plant breeding and director of the Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies, "catalyzed faculty to build bridges across complementary and critical fields of investigation, such as animal and plant genetics, evolutionary biology, pathology, computational sciences, biophysics, and chemical biology." The new initiative, he said, "will build on this momentum to generate new visions and insights, and to further engage and communicate without encumbering investigators by classical denitions of disciplinary boundaries."
New York state funding expected
A large share of the total investment in the New Life Sciences Initiative will be assumed from CGI, including $110 million for the proposed Life Science Technology Building. Cornell's trustees have approved siting the building on Alumni Field, adjacent to the Biotechnology Building and central to life science-activities on campus. It is scheduled for completion in 2006. The new structure, said Kresovich, who chairs the building's planning committee, is expected "to be an intellectual and operational hub to engage people in the life sciences across campus."
Funds for the building are likely to come from two sources: New York state and private donors. The state, through its funding agency, the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research, last year designated Cornell as the site for a Strategically Targeted Academic Research center for Genomics Technologies and Information Sciences. No funding has yet been appropriated, but it is hoped that the amount could be as high as $15 million.
In addition, the New York State Senate in March 2001 passed a bill to create a program called Gen*NY*sis (for Generating Employment Through New York Science) that would provide funding for the life sciences, with the goal of job creation. The state is expected to fund the program this fiscal year, and Cornell is expected to receive up to $30 million, to be matched by the university 3-to-1. A key component of the program is to create research consortia around universities, and Cornell will dedicate most of its funding for a business incubator and related activities in the Life Science Technology Building to provide expertise, networks and tools that startup and existing companies need to exploit research.
Other campus efforts to be included in the New Life Sciences Initiative investment portfolio are $62.5 million for the Duffield
Hall project, now well under way on the Engineering Quad; $18 million to $20 million for new transgenic mouse facilities and laboratories
in the College of Veterinary Medicine; and between $50 million and $75 million for renovated and expanded facilities for the departments
of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Physics and Applied and Engineering Physics in the Baker/Olin/Clark precinct, as well as
significant laboratory renovations in existing buildings on campus. Funds also will support startup costs for at least 50 new faculty hires over
five years and will provide bridge funding for five new graduate fellowships in 2003-04, and 10 in each of the two following years.
The fellowships were first proposed in the CGI Phase II plan and now will be incorporated in the New Life Sciences Initiative. The new program also will undertake to carry out the CGI's stated aim of the creation of an integrated undergraduate life sciences teaching curriculum. The interdisciplinary nature of the new program, said Ron Hoy, professor of neurobiology and behavior, "will make it easier for physical science and engineering students who might not have thought of undergraduate research opportunities in the life sciences to make contributions in biology by working on interdisciplinary projects where they can learn and conduct research in the boundary-less eld that life science is becoming."
Subjects like computational genomics, he said, need students strong in computer science, mathematics and statistics to work with scientists who generate the primary data, primarily biologists. "On the undergraduate level, these opportunities follow and expand President Rawlings's vision of offering students opportunities not just in a single laboratory -- in physics or in biology -- but in other labs and facilities throughout the campus," said Hoy.
Lectures to honor Nobel laureate
About $100 million of the needed resources already are committed, President Rawlings said at the Lincoln Hall reception, and
he announced a newly endowed, annual lecture series in genomics honoring Robert
W. Holley (1922-93), Ph.D. Cornell '47. Holley
shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with two other researchers for their discovery of the structure of transfer RNA, which
is essential to the construction of proteins from the DNA master plan. He taught biochemistry at Cornell from 1948 to 1964 and was
a member of the on-campus USDA/ARS Plant Soil and Nutritional
Laboratory. 
Some of the newly committed funding is supporting the new initiative's interdisciplinary research programs, such as Basic Ecology and Environmental Science, allowing one of its two divisions formed to date, Biogeochemistry and Biocomplexity, to hire five new faculty members. Nelson Hairston, the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Environmental Science, who heads the division, said the new organization will allow his field "to interact across the whole sweep of biology, from genes to whole organisms, and well into the geophysical and geochemical sciences, to begin to understand how the natural world is put together."
The new funding also is supporting the second of Basic Ecology's divisions, Molecular and Chemical Ecology (or MaCE), a joint program between Cornell and BTI, enabling the program to hire five faculty.
A number of the new hires, said Barry Carpenter, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, inevitably will be in the interface of the physical sciences with biology. Carpenter estimates that "our department will need to hire at least two new faculty a year for the foreseeable future, and a significant number of those will be in the initiative's chemical biology research." The interdisciplinary, cooperative nature of a campuswide initiative is important both for this hiring and for creating new facilities, said Carpenter. "There is no road map to this initiative. This science is advancing so fast that a departmental approach doesn't work. We need facilities in place to allow scientists to come together, and Cornell's traditional interaction and breadth allows this."
Two groups to advise the provost
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| At the April 30 reception in Lincoln Hall for the New Life Sciences Initiative, Inge Reichenbach, right, vice president for alumni affairs and development, speaks with Bruce Lewenstein, associate professor of science communication. Robert Barker/University Photography |
Provost Martin will accomplish her oversight of this complex organization and its functioning with advice from two groups
·The Life Sciences Advisory Council, created in the summer of 2000 to advise the president and provost about anything taking place on campus with a biological component. Hoy chairs the 16-member group of senior faculty members, which will regularly review all initiative planning. Nine of the council's members also will sit on a newly formed subcommittee intended to be a rapid decision-making body that will advise the provost on a weekly basis.
·The External Life Sciences Advisory Council, created by the provost last fall to review all initiative plans, from building and hiring to funding. All five members of the group, who will visit Cornell for the first time in September, are members of the National Academy of Sciences, and one, Harold Varmus, president, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is a former director of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate.
Aquadro stresses that the new initiative "is not an attempt to usurp the departments' role in areas of recruitment, but to enhance it." CGI's Phase I, he said, demonstrated a dramatic enhancement in the quality of students and faculty attracted to Cornell. "People at Harvard and Stanford tell me they are amazed at the way we have been able to get the best people and at the quality and spirit of cooperation that has happened across departments and across disciplines." As just one example, said Aquadro, genomics research requires not only new methodologies for rapid DNA sequence detection, but also the computational and statistical tools to manage and analyze the data and the biological expertise to link sequence to function in the cell, in the organism and in the environment, all requiring cross-discipline and cross-campus cooperation.
Noted Adler, "Although several other research universities have undertaken similar initiatives, Cornell's is arguably the most comprehensive and best integrated, largely because our faculty have led the effort at every stage of its development."
The new initiative also will link such areas as neuroscience, as well as basic ecology and environmental science, with genomics. Understanding the biochemistry and the functioning of the brain is enhanced by knowledge of the genes that encode the pathways that synthesize and metabolize essential compounds. For example, genetic variation in enzymes that metabolize drugs is important to understanding and treating depression and cardiovascular disease. In the same way, said Aquadro, "our understanding of the ebb and flow of nutrients in the environment will be enhanced by our ability to assess the genetic makeup of the organisms in those communities."
In many respects, Carpenter said, the broader initiative already is under way. "It is a continuing process of fund raising, construction and hiring that will go on for 10 years," he said. And Tanksley commented: "This is like a race we have been running for a number of years. Now we have a new, larger banner under which we are all running."
Members: Charles Aquadro*, Molecular Biology and Genetics; Barbara Baird*, Chemistry and Chemical Biology; Carl Batt, Food Science; Richard Cerione*, Molecular Medicine; Alan Collmer, Plant Pathology; Sol Gruner*, Physics; Nelson Hairston*, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Maureen Hanson, Molecular Biology and Genetics; Gary Harman, Horticultural Sciences; Ronald Hoy*, Neurobiology and Behavior; Daniel Klessig, Boyce Thompson Institute; Michael Kotlikoff*, Biomedical Sciences; Susan Riha, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Michael Shuler*, Chemical Engineering; Steven Tanksley*, Plant Breeding; Watt Webb, Applied and Engineering Physics
*Denotes member of subcommittee
Members: Gerald Fink, professor of genetics, Whitehead Institute; Robert Langer, professor of chemical and biomedical engineering, MIT; Pamela Matson, professor of biogeochemistry, Stanford University; Christopher Somerville, Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford; Harold Varmus, president, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
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