In recognition of Stanford's leading role in the coming biological revolution, Stanford Report is launching "Frontiers in Biology" -- an occasional series of in-depth conversations with prominent researchers and policy makers on campus. Our first interview is with Matthew Scott, professor of developmental biology and of genetics, who was appointed last January to chair Bio-X -- arguably the most ambitious interdisciplinary bioscience research effort in the world.

Q: The eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has called the 21st century the century of biology. I'm wondering if that's something you agree with?

A: There's been so much excitement in the past century with biology, I think that most biologists feel that they're very lucky to be alive now -- to partake of this incredible feast of discoveries in biology. We went in 50 years from not understanding the fundamental core of the whole thing, which is the information content of DNA, to now having a pretty detailed knowledge of the genome and of the proteins it encodes, and some knowledge about the underlying regulatory mechanisms that allow all of that to work to build an organism.

There's a lot more to be learned here, and so Dyson's comment is certainly appropriate. In a way it's like we have the phone book now, we have the listing of the numbers and the addresses and the names. But that's so different from understanding the culture and the histories and the activities of all of the people listed in that phone book. While there's a lot of work on this going on now, transforming that phone book into a living picture of the lives in a cell and the lives of cells working together is something that should occupy much of the next century. I certainly think his enthusiasm is well placed.

Q: Especially for a physicist!

A: The physicists are going to be absolutely crucial in making our science of biology much more rigorous and precise. For example, the move by many people, including some involved in Bio-X -- this is work by chemists and physicists -- to looking at single molecules rather than populations of molecules and understanding the detailed attributes without blurring the scene by looking at whole populations at once, which is what we normally do. We normally average things, and that's essentially a blurring process.

We need to look at the individual activities of single protein molecules, and a number of people at Stanford are extremely good at that. Some of the properties of the biological molecules can be exploited in new ways to create new kinds of molecules, and physics and chemistry are the foundation of those innovations.

Q: At the Faculty Senate in June, you described the Bio-X program as a "social experiment." I'm just wondering what you meant by that.

A: The greatest challenge, I think, in making Bio-X work and making it special, and not just another program with a few activities, will be in finding practical ways to start the communication process between people who normally don't see each other and don't talk about things at any depth. The challenge will be to make those encounters more than superficial -- to make a group of students who were thinking about computer science sit down with a group of cell biologists and really get an in-depth conversation going between those groups. Have them spout their outrageous ideas to each other and find out that some of their new friends can help bring those ideas to fruition.

This has been tried before. It's being tried in a number of cases in industry. It is not easy to bring different cultures together, and we have quite different cultures here in the various science and engineering worlds.

Q: When the Clark Center is built and everybody is in place there and in other parts of the campus, what kind of mechanism do you envision would work to get that going?

A: One of the big differences between an academic setting and an industrial setting is that, in industry, a goal is defined -- for example, to build a new printer. In a top-down way, you assemble a team, which will include the chemists who have to think about inks, and the robotics people have to think about it, and the financial people and the marketing people. You bring this quite interdisciplinary team together, and you tell them, "This is what we need to do. Here are the parameters. We need it to be this price." So they build this thing. It's telling people what to work on, and they can be creative within that framework.

In an academic setting, you really want to leave wide open the possibility of unexpected discoveries, and you also want to recognize the fact that there is no tradition of any faculty telling other faculty what to think about and what their goals should be and shouldn't be. So we cannot have a situation with Bio-X or other programs here where there is a top-down announcement of a plan to do a particular project, and now everybody has to come do it. There could be announcements of teams that are starting to take shape where the people have come up with a goal they think is exciting, and one can let other people know that this is happening and welcome their participation.

So it's a voluntary thing, and one can also spur some action by providing some incentives -- prizes for particularly exciting successes that involve interdisciplinary work between groups of students in different fields, for example. The competitive grants program, the [Bio-X] Interdisciplinary Initiatives program, which is running now, is an incentives program that provides seed money for new projects -- especially projects that bring together people who have not previously worked together.

I think there are ways to encourage exciting things to happen by not particularly rewarding the norm, but instead concentrating on rewarding the exceptions and the surprises and the oddities.

Q: In the sciences, you think of the Human Genome Project or the space race that put humans on the moon or the building of the atomic bomb -- these were things that were specific goals that brought a lot of disciplines together. But those were grandiose projects.

A: One of things we have to keep in mind is that, at root, we're here to provide an education that will prepare students to be leaders and to be creative and to think in original ways. Any project that becomes factory production does not fit with that kind of goal. So, we are not, in house, going to do things that are production line -- things like the genome projects have become. Innovations about how to do them better is another matter!

Q: So, in the Clark Center, where you're going to have some 40 faculty -- physicists, chemists, engineers, biologists, clinicians -- what is the idea of having them all in one building? How are they actually going to be working together?

A: As a rough estimate, there are probably some 200 or so faculty who will become affiliated with this program. The exact number isn't important. People can become involved as much as they want, and anyone who wants to be affiliated will be. From within that group of a couple of hundred, there will about 40 in one place -- in the Clark Center.

The Clark Center is there to make the Bio-X program more vigorous and successful. It can't possibly encompass the whole program. The building will accommodate on the order of 600 people, which is a lot of people, but it's not a lot of people when compared to what's needed to encompass fields like biophysics and genetics and genomics and computational science applied to biology and so on -- these are enormous areas.

The people in the Clark Center will have a special opportunity to work very closely with each other. The selection of those people by the deans has been governed by a goal of choosing people who are already involved in some degree of interdisciplinary work and expect to be more so. About a third of the people who will eventually be in that building will be new faculty recruited to Stanford, so there will be a good starting group of some 25 or so existing faculty, and a few newly arrived faculty, and then another 10 or so new recruits will eventually join this group.

Within that building, my hope is that there will be a very special atmosphere. We [the Bio-X Executive Committee] have carefully set aside a substantial amount of the space as shared facilities, including so-called "hotel space," which means space where someone will come in for a specific project. It might be a student from a lab on campus who is not full time in the Clark Center, it might be an industrial visitor, it might be a sabbatical visitor and so on. There will be a defined period of occupation of that space, and then someone else will come in. By using space in that way, we hope to accelerate the turnover of people in the building and create more opportunities for new projects and new collaborations.

James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences

Q: Does that mean turnover of the 40 faculty as well?

A: No; they're going to be there for a long time.

Q: Are you going to be in the Clark Center yourself?

A: Yes.

Q: At the Faculty Senate, you said that students are the bridge to the success or failure of Bio-X, because they are the ones who actually have time to learn. You're not going to learn quantum physics. Maybe you know it already.

A: [laughs] No, I don't!

Yes, the problem is that everybody's extremely busy. It's difficult for people to undertake a new interdisciplinary project if it isn't the central focus of the lab and they have to concentrate on what they're doing and keep that going as well. And that's particularly true of faculty who are involved in so many activities. It's hard for them to take a couple of years off and learn about a new field.

So the students and postdocs, students of all type -- undergraduate, medical and graduate students -- they are, I think, the absolute key here. What we're after here is for a student in one field sitting down at lunch with a student from a completely different field to talk with each other and realize that there's an opportunity here that no one has recognized before. They will start the project and bring the faculty with them. One of the challenges will be to work out how to provide a multidisciplinary education that is serious and not superficial. We can't be dabbling in other fields. People have to learn things in depth, and that's hard because these are not easy fields to learn. So we have to find the right way, the right formula to teach biologists some physics -- not by dumbing it down but instead by being selective and putting together the right parts of physics that are most applicable to a problem in biology. That's not an easy task. It will take a lot of work by all the people who think about education at Stanford to make this work better than it does. Right now, there's not nearly enough done in this direction, in my opinion.

Q: Last year, before you became chair, Jim Clark made his decision to withhold $60 million of his original $150 million pledge as a protest against President Bush's decision to restrict federally funded research on embryonic stem cells. A year later, what's your assessment of the effectiveness of that protest?

A: The stem cell debate is continuing, with many Stanford scientists very heavily involved in that debate. While nothing has been settled yet, I would say the movement has been toward a greater appreciation of the potential benefits of research using stem cells and maybe eventually of treatments using stem cells, but the debate rages on.

It's very difficult for me to assess what is going on in the minds of some of the country's leaders and whether they are paying attention to more than their own favorite constituency. Obviously, there's a polarization around this debate, and it's not really clear to me that anyone on one side or the other is listening a whole lot to the opposing side in terms of actually changing their actions.

So I think it's very hard to assess the impact of Jim Clark's criticism of the president's decision. In any case, we have a fantastic community here of people working with stem cells from multiple organisms. I hope that as Jim learns more about what's going on here, and maybe some of these political debates are settled at the national level, that he'll come back to us and renew his additional support. That said, we're extremely grateful for this enormous gift he's already made.

Q: You told the Faculty Senate there were "serious" funding efforts under way. What did you mean by that?

A: The sense of opportunity here is very strong, and the people who have come to look at Bio-X -- the visitors and potential donors who have looked at it so far -- I think have seen that there's a lot of real substance there, and that we're doing something very unusual in an academic setting, something very special, and there's excitement.

Now we know we're at a time when the financial situation in this country is not what it could be, so it's an uphill struggle. Very good people here at the university are bringing to the attention of potential donors the many opportunities associated with this and other good programs here. But we're still struggling against the current climate.

I've been learning by looking at Bio-X--like efforts being made elsewhere, and a lot of people have been coming to visit and look at what Stanford is doing. I've had inquiries from scientific institutions in a variety of countries -- Iceland, Sweden, Japan, France, England. There are different models, and we have a really good model. We think in some ways we're a bit ahead of the curve, but I think that other people are doing interesting and innovative things in this area, too, and to stay ahead we're going to need more support.

Q: Someone at the Faculty Senate raised the question about the difficulty of getting big block grants for interdisciplinary science research.

A: That is an issue. The minute the research starts looking unfamiliar -- whether we're talking about the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health or private foundations -- if the research goes outside their normal spectrum of activities, they get understandably cautious. Bringing to bear new ideas or technologies to a problem makes the really exciting stuff happen.

So we have to convince the funding agencies that the ideas really aren't wild -- that the ideas are very solid. The ideas may be different from what the funding agencies are used to, but with proper preparation we will get their enthusiastic support. That is going to be a challenge.

Q: You've emphasized that degrees, everything will be done through the departments?

A: Right. The Bio-X program leaves all of the work of teaching courses, hiring faculty, admitting students -- all of those traditional roles of departments remain in place, which means, for example, that everyone in the Clark Center maintains a tight affiliation with their home department. They'll continue to share in all the departmental activities -- the retreats, the recruiting of students, the recruiting of new faculty and so on. So that should keep those ties very strong, which will be important.

Q: And there are some faculty who've expressed concern about tenure for assistant professors, who will be sort of isolated or farther away from their departments.

A: In fact, we're going to focus on this problem quite seriously. There's a substantial fraction of the Clark Center faculty who are assistant professors, and I'm very happy about that. We're going to focus on making sure that those assistant professors get proper mentorship from neighbors in the Clark Center, proper mentorship from senior colleagues back in their home department, and adequate exposure in terms of presenting their talks and research to the faculty in their home department who will be assessing them for promotion.

Q: Is there a way to reach out to other parts of the campus, because, again, there were a couple of faculty at the senate in humanities who felt you should explain what you are doing more -- perhaps making bioethics a bigger component.

A: Yes. We have a bioethics expert, Hank Greely [professor of law] as a member of the Bio-X Leadership Council, and he will be advising about this. Many issues are likely to come up -- issues of access to health care, debates about the meaning, practical applications, and dangers of new technologies, or genetic privacy -- all kinds of things arise, some of them ethical issues and some of them scientific issues with social impact, not strictly ethical.

I hope that the community looks at these things and gives some feedback about what they find exciting and what they find dismaying, and so on. The scientists can't decide how to use all these things. The main thing is for the community to realize that the scientists, the engineers and everybody working on this -- that there's a human face in all this. Many of the people engaged in Bio-X are working very hard to try and find ways to heal people, to understand better human history and human abilities, to do things that are of direct human benefit. Many people involved in science and technology are highly aware that technology can be applied in destructive ways, and that there has to be a good social debate about the uses of all this technology. The best way to start that debate is with rigorous and proper information about what is happening and what it means.

I think there's an obligation for the Bio-X program, as part of its activity, to communicate with people on campus who are not actually engaged in the program, and to communicate with people in the surrounding community who might be curious and who might enjoy visiting some of these labs and hearing talks about some of the work going on and so on. I hope we'll put that all in place over the next few years.

Q: You said at the Faculty Senate, "The worst that can happen is that we'll have a nice new building with a lot of smart people doing exciting things. But that will not be enough. I think if we only do that, it will be disappointing to me." What did you mean by that?

A: What I meant is that we have to do some things that are distinctive and effective. All of these words are overused -- talking about interdisciplinary research is trite at this point. Everybody says the same words, but we have to, in this case, really do it.

A few years from now, we'll be looking and saying, did projects take off that would not have taken off had we not put this together? We'll be looking for cases where the juxtaposition of people from different fields, both inside the Clark Center and in events of the Bio-X program, led to new projects. I hope that the people in Bio-X will come out of their shells and their comfortable little groups of familiar co-workers and really look hard for chances to do something unique and new.

Successes are measured in publications, inventions and success in external funding -- and career successes for all the people involved. With respect to the larger Bio-X community, which is really the important measure, will we have put in place successfully a system so that someone who conceives of a new project can get it done better and faster because they know which colleagues to go to? Can they get seed money, can they get space in the Clark Center to use for a while? The program has to have a concrete effect.

Has innovation come from this group of people -- innovations you could say have something to do with the program? It's tricky because a lot of these people would have been doing great work anyway, so we have to see whether we've done something new here. I think we can. Stanford is the perfect place for Bio-X to happen, but there is room for accelerated success in interdisciplinary education and research.

Q: Are you glad you took the job as chair, or do you sometimes ask yourself, "Why did I take this job?"

A: I feel really privileged to be able to take some time and work on this for my period of time. I should mention my gratitude toward [Provost] John Etchemendy and [President] John Hennessy and the deans, because they really have come together. The deans are working together effectively as members of the Bio-X Executive Committee. They're engaged, sensitive to the needs of the program and enthusiastic. And, of course, for the Johns, this is an important legacy project, and they've certainly given it the attention that carries that message.

Obviously, there are good days and bad days [laughs], as with any other project, but overall I'm tremendously excited about the enthusiasm I'm sensing from faculty and from students about making this real. We have a beautiful new building to help support this; we have an exciting new Department of Bioengineering coming along that will be an unprecedented bridge between Engineering and the Medical School.

The personal pleasure for me has been getting to know a lot of people around the campus, who, without Bio-X, I would probably not have gotten to meet. There's an amazing amount going on around here! I think we want to create for other people the experience I've been having -- finding out what's going on here and thinking about ideas and tools that could be useful and applicable to your own scientific and career goals. If everybody does that, we'll be way ahead.

Matthew Scott

• Scott says Bio-X breaks down boundaries of biological research
  
  
• First Bio-X researchers highlight projects at show-and-tell, pave way for round two (04/20/02)
  
  
• Scott appointed chair of culture-bridging Bio-X council (01/30/02)
  
  
• Miffed by stem cell policy, Clark suspends Bio-X gift (09/05/01)
  
  
• Bio-X awards $3 million in grants for interdisciplinary projects (10/04/00)
  
  
• Bio-X

The centerpiece of Bio-X is the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences -- a state-of-the-art facility now under construction. When completed, the center will house faculty, students, postdocs and technicians with research interests in such areas as chemical biology, biocomputation, regenerative medicine, instrumentation and genomics. Photo: L.A. Cicero