From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 06:15:21 PDT
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From: cunews@cornell.edu
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 5:29 PM
To: CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L@cornell.edu; CUNEWS-LIFE_SCIENCE-L@cornell.edu; CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Cornell News: Life Sciences Initiative
Cornell launches largest scientific effort in university's history:
$500 million Life Sciences Initiative for research, education
FOR RELEASE: May 8, 2002
Contact: David Brand
Office: 607-255-3651
E-mail: deb27@cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University has launched the largest single
scientific effort in its history: the New Life Sciences Initiative, a
campuswide program that will forever change the way life-science
research is conducted and taught at the university. Involving
investments of up to $500 million, the initiative will require the
largest fund-raising campaign for a single project ever attempted by
Cornell.
Announcing the new initiative, Cornell President Hunter Rawlings said
the effort will engage "the most broadly respected faculty in the
country" in what he predicted will 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.
The new initiative will involve seven colleges, several hundred
faculty and up to 60 departments in an interdisciplinary research and
education program. Also participating are the New York State
Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., as well as the Boyce
Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) and the U.S. Department
of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS), both on
Cornell's Ithaca campus.
The initiative will support at least 50 new faculty hires, in
addition to two dozen already hired in life-sciences-related fields,
broaden undergraduate education in the life sciences and create as
many as 100 new graduate fellowships. It also will support the
building of several facilities, including a proposed Life Science
Technology Building; a nanotechnology-research center, Duffield Hall,
now under construction; new facilities for chemistry and chemical
biology, physics and applied and engineering physics; and significant
laboratory renovations across campus.
Through cross-campus cooperation, the life sciences initiative will
seek new methodologies for rapid DNA sequence detection, the
computational and statistical tools to manage and analyze the data,
and use Cornell's biological expertise to link sequence to function
in the cell, in the organism and in the environment. The new
initiative also will link genomics with such areas as neuroscience,
basic ecology and environmental science.
Cornell Provost Biddy Martin will control the coordination of the
life-sciences effort with advice from 16 senior faculty and from the
External Life Science Advisory Council, newly created to review all
initiative plans, from building and hiring to funding. All five
members of the group 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. Other members of the panel are Gerald Fink,
professor of genetics, Whitehead Institute; Robert Langer, professor
of chemical and biomedical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; Pamela Matson, professor of biogeochemistry, Stanford
University; and Christopher Somerville, Carnegie Institution of
Washington at Stanford.
The interdisciplinary research programs supported by the initiative
will continue to be faculty-driven, and a previous five-year-old
scientific effort, the Cornell Genomics Initiative (CGI), will form a
major part of the new effort, says Kraig Adler, vice provost for life
sciences. "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 says.
Adds Charles Aquadro, professor of molecular biology and genetics:
"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."
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 central to life-science activities on
campus. It is scheduled for completion in 2006.
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 start-up and
existing companies need to exploit research.
Other campus efforts to be included in the new initiative's
investment portfolio are $62.5 million for Duffield Hall, the
nanotechnology-research building; $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, as
well as significant laboratory renovations in existing buildings on
campus.
Funds also will support start-up costs for at least 50 new faculty
hires over five years, and for graduate fellowships. Also being
instituted is an 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, and he
taught biochemistry at Cornell from 1948 to 1964.
About $100 million of the needed resources already are committed,
some of it to support 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, says 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
members. A number of the new hires, said Barry Carpenter, professor
and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,
inevitably will be for the Physical-Sciences/Life Sciences Interface
program.
Notes 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."
Related World Wide Web sites: The following site provides
additional information on this news release.
o Cornell Genomics Initiative: <http://www.genomics.cornell.edu/>
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The web version of this release may be found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/May02/lifesci.init.deb.html
Cornell University News Service
Surge 3
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
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