David Baltimore
1975 Nobel Laureate in Medicine
President, California Institute of Technology
"Science and Society: The Role of the Research University"
February 23, 2002

David Baltmore: I consider research universities to be the most powerful force in American society. That is a big claim, but I think it is justified. American society has been transformed, particularly over the years since World War II.

You can trace much of that transformation to discoveries made in research universities--communications, in medicine and transport. Everything has developed, ultimately, an industry (and they make all the money). But, it originates in concepts that have developed in our institutions of higher learning.

So, what is a research university? It is an institution that seamlessly fuses research and teaching. It is different from a liberal arts college where teaching is paramount.

I said American, but why is it particularly American? Because it really is. It is fundamentally because we won World War II and then we understood the lesson from World War II, that strength and technology was paramount.

But we also had an educational system already in place into which we could put technology rather than setting it up in separate research institutions.

In Europe, the tradition has been to separate research and teaching. In the United States, the tradition has been to diffuse them. I think that is particularly powerful because it means that students can be taught within the framework of frontier concepts.

The guide to this development was Vannevar Bush. He wrote a book called, Science: The Endless Frontier as a manifesto for the development of federal funding for research.

He saw that basic science is what led to knew technology, and he provided the mandate for focusing university activities on basic science.

His analysis and the federal funding that followed that led to institutional explosions across the United States, and led to the kind of expansion that today generates great institutions like the University of Virginia.

What I want to do today is to contrast what most universities do, and what Cal Tech does. The driving force of most universities and most faculties is growth. The measure of success is how big you get, the positions you have and how much money you have to hire new people and build new buildings.

I just came from Harvard Medical School, which is like a tumor in Boston. Cal Tech has always run by a different donor. Cal Tech is a young institution and only really started when it got its name in the 1920. It was built on the bones of an earlier institution that was really nothing like Cal Tech. It was the result of the vision of one man--George Ellory Hale. He was a great man of the 20^th century, but rarely known to people since he was not so much a public figure as a great figure in the intellectual world. He was an astronomer who set up the Mount Wilson telescopes and the Palamar (??) telescopes and really was the man who saw the opportunity that Cal Tech offered.

All of this happened in the early 20^th century in Pasadena, California. Where Hale was intrigued by the pioneering spirit of the west, he saw the possibility of doing something which had not been done in those days, which was to build a science-based university that could teach engineers, in particular, in the context of science, not so much how to build bridges.

He contrasted it to his alma mater, which was MIT. MIT did not really come to be a great institution in science until after WWII. But, Hale oversaw the transformation of Cal Tech, and it was a downsizing that started it all off--take fewer students, but better students, have a sharper focus of teaching not a broad focus of teaching, do what you do extremely well, and then think of doing a little bit more. It is unique. No institution I know started by getting smaller. We still do it that way. We just got the largest gift in the history of academia--$600 million from Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel.

And so, when people heard about it the first thing they asked was, "what are you going to do with it?" What they expected to hear was that we were going to start a new school of something. Or, that we are going to build 20 new buildings to make a whole new campus and get away from all those earthquakes to some place safe. We are not going to do anything of this sort. We are going to try to make each faculty member, each student, and each post-doc at Cal Tech more productive. Maybe some labs are going to get very big, but we will use that kind of money to provide shared resources so that people can use the latest equipment and have available the latest facilities and be able to work at the highest level they can.

The nicest thing that anybody said to me at Cal Tech was a young professor who said that he had everything he could possibly want--good students, tremendous facilities and beautiful laboratories. He said, "If I don't succeed, it's my fault."

With that framework, let me talk a little about the development and challenges in a modern research university, with some emphasis on Cal Tech because that is the school that I knew very well. I will emphasize biology because that is the area that I know best. I am going to talk about science and its role. I don't mean to neglect the importance of the humanities. But, the humanities do not define a research university. Also, one other caveat is that Cal Tech does not have a medical school, nor a football team.

I think we all know that biology was revolutionized in the 20^th century. It means, actually, that biology became an interdisciplinary science. So, if you look at the 19^th century, biology was largely descriptive. Then, at the dawn of the 20^th century, genetics was born. It was born by a rediscovery of the experiments of Mendel done 30 years previously, but it had no impact. Genetics is the quintessential, biological method. It is the only thing that is truly biological. Everything else we do as biologists we got from some where else--imaging methods from physicists, chemical methods from chemists. But genetics is biological. What it did was allow biology to go away from being observation to being experimentation.

The guy who put it into physical reality was Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was then working at Columbia University. He made biology into a science. Because he was American and he started a school of American science, he really defined the 20^th century biology as an American science.

Morgan found and mapped the first mutation in 1911. In 1926 he was known as the father of genetics and he had spawned a whole school of people who worked according to the ideas of his language.

In that year, he was approached by Cal Tech, who had the audacity to approach Morgan. It was hard to believe. He was convinced to come to them, to start biology. Under other's influence, we had physics, we had chemistry and we had engineering. The next thing they wanted to do was have biology--which was very forward-looking. There was a clear realization that genetics was the way to do biology. If you go back and read what Morgan said about his view of science around that time, he believed that the future of biology was the application of chemistry and physics to the kind of problems that he had defined. He recognized that the gene--the notion of genetics--was a pure formalism. No one had any idea what the physical reality was. But, he understood that if we could find the physical reality behind the genetics, then we would have a really generative science. He never, of course, lived to see that. He died in 1943.

But, the spirit that he brought the father of biology, Max Delbruck, to Cal Tech. Delbruck believed that genetics was the only true science. In fact, he never understood the importance of chemistry. He led the FAGE group, which is the legendary group that started molecular biology.

There was also a very strong southwestern contingent at that time. Salvador Loria (??) led that who shared the Nobel Prize for that work. Loria moved to MIT and started molecular biology there, but that was decades after Delbruck had begun his work at Cal Tech.

Maybe the real home of all of this was Coldspring Harbor (??), the place that all of these people met together and thought together and made sure that they were sort of aligned in their thinking about what was going on.

I think that it is a very important point that nothing I have said involves medicine. Medicine was crying out for understanding. Nobody understood cancer, heart disease, or anything fundamental about medical problems. But, the origins were not among people who were struck by the medical need, but rather among people who had scientific curiosity.

In truth, the FAGE Group were the princes of molecular biology, but they were not the key contributors to making the revolution. That happened in Cambridge, England, at the Cavender's (??) Laboratory. It really demonstrates the limitations of genetics, as Morgan certainly understood, because it was a fusion of chemistry with biology that led to solving the structure of DNA, and it was the structure of DNA that generated the revolution that we have been living.

The same thing can be said about the structure of protein. Linus Pauling worked at Cal Tech and saw that proteins are made out of two basic structures--alpha-helices and beta-sheet, and set the real basis for understanding protein structure. Although the real x-ray crystallography was again done at the Cavender Laboratory.

You can see this whole principle at work if you just follow through the early development of molecular biology.

Matheson and Stahl were in fusion of genetics in chemistry. Matheson was a chemistry student at Pauling, Stahl was a geneticist.

The discovery of messenger RNA was posited by work in genetics, but proved by chemical experiments.

Ed Lewis, working again at Cal Tech, established the key role of genes in development. But we are still working out what that means bio-chemically. Even when we talk about behavior, we see now some behavioral mutants that show us the kinds of genes involved in behavior.

When biology makes great leaps, it is almost always because of interdisciplinary interactions. That is really what I want to talk about. Because what research universities are good for is for providing those interactions--of taking two ends of science and technology and fusing them together to do something brand new.

I believe that biology is in the position today where interdisciplinarity is the whole story. The reason that really comes by looking at what it means to have sequenced the genomes of many organisms. We have sequenced the human genomes, the genome of the mouse, and many other genomes of microorganisms. This will continue to generate information for a long time. That in itself is an extremely interdisciplinary activity because it requires the skills of mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, geneticists and scientific entrepreneurs to generate and handle the huge amounts of data.

Now we have the genomes as a resource. So, these same complementary strengths coming from 4 to 5 different sides, are being applied to screening operations, using the genome information, to try to ferret out regularities that might be suggestive of underlying biology--expressions of genes in one kind of cell or not, co-regulation of genes under one condition or not.

But, I don't think that that is going to get us to where we want to go. We need to understand each of those genes individually. There are some 30,000 to 40,000 human genes. To understand them individually--proteins and their interactions and their biochemistry--it takes the skills of everybody to be found on a research university campus today.

There is a big push, for instance, to miniaturization, which is extremely important and is being done by chemists and applied physicists so that we can do these genomic screenings on a large scale, very efficiently and cheaply.

It is extremely important that we use the latest techniques being given to us by physicists to image biological systems--to try to see what is going on in cells, what is going on in organisms, and to tie a possible resolution for our understanding of cellular and animal events.

A remarkable example of the need for interdisciplinarity is the attempt now being done in a few places to use the brain to control prostheses. So people who have lost control of their limbs through accidents or disease, still have their brain centered, which is setting up the intention to move and to act, but they cannot then carry it through because the motor systems are severed from the control systems. What you need then, is an electronic system that can read what is going on in the brain and tell an artificial arm or leg how to move. That should be under the control of an individual. That will be done. It is being done right now and will be successful within some years. What does it take to do that? Engineers, roboticists, neurophysiologists, medical people, all have to work together seamlessly to make something like that happen.

I could go on with all sorts of examples from around the country. If the biology of the future is to be done in an interdisciplinary fashion, where will it be done? The answer to that, which should be obvious at this point, is that it can only be done in research universities. It is the only place that you find these complimentary skills. It is the only place that provides the institutional structure for the people to get together.

But what is required is that people talk to each other--that they talk to each other across what are the usual barriers to discussion. Those people cannot just be the faculty members and certainly cannot just be the administrators. It has to be the graduate students and post-doctoral who have the time and the facility to go out and create new ideas, new interfaces, new ways of doing it.

I happen to believe from my experiences at Cal Tech that size is an enemy, that huge groups, departments, institutes, lead to a mentality in which people see only those people around them because there are so many people around them. They do not get far enough away from themselves to interact with new people who are thinking new thoughts differently.

I believe that interdisciplinarity flourishes in smaller institutional frameworks. I think it is very important that we think about how we maintain those kinds of frameworks.

For instances, about 20 years ago I happened to evolve a model which turned out to provide a very good framework for thinking this. It is the Whitehead Institute. It is a largely independent institution, affiliated closely with MIT, seamlessly engaging in teaching and somewhat different from the point of view of research. It provides, within a larger institutional framework, a smaller setting for interaction.

Admittedly, when I set this up, everybody was a biologist. We were not really ready for the broad scale interactions that we need today. But, even within that framework, ultimately Eric Lander used it to build what is the most effective genome center in the world and combined skills from many different disciplines to do that.

What was particularly valuable to him was the flexibility he found in this setting. I believe that institutional settings are key to providing the opportunity to creative people to move ahead in new directions.

Let me comment a little bit about different kinds of science. When I started in biology, everything that was important was being done in this sort of classic, small science mode--individual laboratories with a principal investigator and a small number of trainees. Science was done by posing questions, and designing tests that could distinguish between various outcomes. Now what we are seeing is a very different style of science, typified, in fact, by the sequencing of genomes. It is qualitatively different because it is basically observation.

As I have thought about this science, which is incredibly powerful in some ways, I have realized that we still do science in different ways--we do observational research, we do hypothesis-driven research, and we do a third kind of research, which I want to emphasize because I think it is extraordinarily important and not usually emphasized, and that is technology development.

Observational research is the modern incarnation of what was the chief mode of studying the world in the earliest of times. Primitive people looked around, saw the world that was given them, and began to catalog. They named the plants, they named the animals, they named the constellations, they made hypotheses about how the world came about and enshrined those in myth and religion because they had no way of really testing. They accepted them and allowed them to shape their world.

Today, we observe molecular structures, we observe gene structures, we observe protein-protein interaction. We still do a lot of science with the goal of describing world, but at finer and finer levels of resolution. It is not only true in biology. The observatories of astronomers, although often used to answer particular questions, today are being used very much to develop catalogs for different phenomenon that are found in the universe.

Observational science is being done on a huge scale today. "Data Glut" is a word that you hear from all kinds of sciences. For biologists who long looked into their microscopes and gasped at the intricacy of nature, the scale of today's observational science represents a qualitatively new mode of investigation. It is the genome project, of course, which is the most massive of such enterprises. They are giving us catalogs of information about the genetic inheritance of many organisms on the earth.

At Cal Tech we are involved in what must be one of the great projects of 21^st century observation in astronomy. We are part of a consortium making a virtual observatory that will link all the observations of the sky that have been made at different wavelengths. But they are not going to bring them together all into one database. The databases are going to stay separated in different institutions and there will be a computer-based link. So, you are going to be able to find a spot in the sky and find out what it looks like in infrared, in the x-rays, in the visible, and basically look at it across the spectrum by scanning different databases and bringing them together.

This is a sort of model of what you do when you have more data than you know what to do with. And we are adding new bits of information all the time. For instance, everything that we have ever observed in the universe really fits on the electromagnetic spectrum. But, there is another way of looking at the world and that is to look at gravity waves. Gravity waves is something that nobody has ever seen--it was predicted by Einstein as a consequence of relativity. And so we and MIT have been building a huge observatory which is going to look for gravity waves. We are going to start collecting data sometime in roughly the next year.

There are many predictions that come out of Einstein's original thoughts about what we should see, but nobody has ever seen anything. This is the ultimate form of observational science--$300 million invested in two observatories to see something which I suppose may not be there.

The trouble with big science is also its greatest strength. It involves many people working together towards a particular end in a collaborative enterprise in which the contribution of the individuals is often obscured. Furthermore, it often removes from consideration one of the chief motivations of becoming involved in science--the ability for an individual to choose the questions that he or she want to work.

My advice is if you want to develop an individuality in a science, you have got to avoid some of these huge scientific programs. You are much better off working in a small science experiment because big science projects really do not provide the good venues for training the next generation.

Let me turn to the second kind of science--hypothesis-driven science. I need say very little about that because that is the science most people are familiar with. In biology it is often done in basically small science groups and a small science mode, but in high energy physics, which is the quintessential big science, most experiments are, in fact, hypothesis-driven. It is not really size that matters, but the nature of the investigation.

In biology, the hypothesis may come from anywhere--from observational science, from earlier hypothesis-driven experiments, and even occasionally from theory. In high energy physics, it is usually theory.

Let me go to the third mode of science, which I differentiated before, technology development. A lot of people say that is just engineering and they separate it from science. But when I came to Cal Tech, one of the discoveries I made about my job was that I was responsible for operating the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPA, there are 5,000 people laboring to produce spacecraft that either orbit the earth or go out into the solar system. But they are basically designed to do science--they are part of the science phenomenon.

One we know best is the Hubble Telescope. There are lots of other spacecraft out their today, looking at Mars, circling the Earth to look at meteorological events on the Earth like El Nino and even one that we have up their looking to collect particles from the solar wind to return them to Earth in a couple years so that we can know what the sun is made of.

They are all doing science and I believe their manufacturer is a part of the scientific enterprise. We can go further because, if you go back to the early 1980's, I think it was space science that gave Lee Hood the idea that technology could also play a big role in biology. So, he developed a big group around himself to build hardware. People thought he was nuts--who needed hardware when we knew how to do biology with our pipettes? His most notable accomplishment was to build the automated DNA sequencer. Again, science was the goal, but technology development was the activity. And in fact now the human genome project could not have been done without automated sequencing. It shows how right Hood was to take that approach at that time.

Let me go back to spacecraft. Technology development involves extremely high-end engineering in the world of spacecraft because of the unique constraints of working in space. The most obvious of these constraints is the cost of a single satellite. They range from a cost of a few hundred million dollars to a billion dollars and even more. With that kind of investment in one instrument, it has to be built to very high tolerance because you really have to minimize the possibility of failure. It takes huge propulsive forces to leave the Earth's atmosphere or even to get into orbit around the Earth. Another constraint is weight--the lighter the better. That puts a huge premium on a miniaturization, which is a central part of the ongoing process of space science.

And finally, power availability on a spacecraft is always a key constraint, making low-powered instruments themselves a goal of the program.

When a single satellite is made, the labor of thousands of people's activities are imbedded into it. How do they assure themselves that there has not been some small but critical error made during the construction of this spacecraft?

The answer is that they have developed engineering systems that check on the functioning of each component. They put the satellite through a battery of tests that often are harsher conditions than the conditions it would encounter when it flies or particularly when it would be sent out into orbit.

One reason that aircraft are so phenomenally expensive is because they have to monitor each step, test continually, and then do a whole series of tests at the end. The importance of this was proven in the mid-1990's. You may remember that the then NASA administrator introduced the mantra of "faster, better, cheaper." He wanted more satellites and at a lower cost. The consequence was two of the probes that we sent to Mars failed. Each because of a tiny little error. In one it was a conversion of English units to metric units. In the other it was a software loop. The consequences, particularly of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were catastrophic. These little tiny errors--99.9% perfection and a little bit of a mistake--were enough to kill the mission. The lesson that we all learned and the lesson that we have to live with is that we cannot skimp on testing. The kind of extensive testing that was done previously, and was skipped on these missions because of the straightened budgets that we were working with, are absolutely necessary. It was a very expensive lesson, but one I believe that has been learned.

Most interdisciplinary science is not so demanding of perfection. It involves a relatively small number of people being brought together with complementary skills. They may not be able to understand each other because they do not understand what the other person is doing too well, but failure is not a disaster.

As science progresses, it deals with harder and harder questions. It requires increasingly extensive tools. The ability of funding in science is an absolutely key issue. In the biological sciences, the opportunities to progress, which have been made by the genome sequencing, have generated tremendous excitement and that has led to the NIH budget being doubled over five years. It is amazing--even with a change in Harding in control of the White House, a commitment has been maintained and this next year's budget should see a completion of a doubling to somewhere in the range of 25 billion dollars a year.

Other science-related agencies have not received such favorable treatment. This is a policy that many of us consider short-sighted because if interdisciplinarity is at the heart of biology, then the forward progress of biological science depends on the strength of many different fields of science, not just what NIH funds but what is funded by NSF, the Department of Energy, and NASA.

The need for this kind of interdisciplinarity has been evident for a long time and has been crucial, really, forever in the sciences. But, I don't think we should draw the wrong lesson from it, which I think some people do. That is, just because interdisciplinarity is the way things move ahead in the most dramatic form, does not mean that we should abandon the strength of the traditional discipline. It is actually the health of these traditional disciplines, which is the key to maintaining the productivity of science overall. Particularly in teaching, I believe that the classic disciplines provide the right focus for teaching and that then at the boarders where two different fields touch each other are the areas where new kinds of science can be done.

I am constantly talking about new kinds of science and new directions. Where is biology going? I will give you three examples, which I consider about as challenging as anything gets. One is understanding of the brain. The second is research for life elsewhere than on earth. The third is a reconstruction of the process of biological evolution.

Each of these I would consider to be a grand challenge. Each is going to take decades, but they are within reach.

The brain is our most complex organ. Its investigation involves an understanding of how incoming information is distributed, how it is processed, and how it is recombined. We are learning about the anatomy of the systems that allow for that process in very fine detail, though we still have even huge challenges in just the anatomical understanding. We have much deeper problems of understanding--how is the information actually encoded? How is it recombined? And, most importantly, how does it produces consciousness?

These are conceptual challenges to our field, the most difficult issues that I see in biological sciences today absolutely requiring of interdisciplinary approaches, but give us a few decades. Those are questions that I believe will be answered.

Searching for life elsewhere--that is a major goal of NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is sort of the main driving force behind a lot of solar system investigations. It can be done by sending satellites to Mars, to Europa, to other bodies that might hold water because water is the key to anything you can conceive of as life. The problem of how exactly you define life is an interesting one and I will not really go into it. But, I think it is safe to say that, whatever it is, it needs water.

We can do that with satellites, but we can also do that from ground-based systems using interferometry and even send up satellites that can then look out into the universe with incredibly high resolution using interferometric methods.

We will be finding whether there are spectral signatures of life over the next decade. Any evidence that there is life away from Earth will, I think, be revolutionary in our thinking about the uniqueness or non-uniqueness of the human species. We can bring some of that back to look at it to find a way to get the resolution necessary to actually see what is going on, and then it will be fabulous.

Evolution took place over billions of years and it is daunting to ever really understand it. But, there is a record. There are records in the Earth, geologists have seen them for centuries, and more importantly, the record is in all of those genomes we are seeing. We should be able to reconstruct what went on by looking at the mutational changes over time in species, particularly if we can use our understanding of mutational movement to understand how things happen back before we now have access to. That is all going to be inter-DNA base life. What is very exciting is the understanding that has come about recently that life probably originated as an RNA-based life, not a DNA-based life. It is possible to probe the limits of an RNA world in the laboratory. We have people doing that now.

I think the challenge of reconstructing evolution is not an impossibility. I see a number of people interested in it today and focusing on it.

So as we develop, for instance, the new field of geo-biology which is beginning to flourish, I think that we will understand better how the evolution of the earth was effected by life and at the same time understand how life was effected by adapting to the changing nature of the world.

I focused pretty much on biology as I told you I would, but it is important to realize that other fields of science have challenges that are just exciting as biology. I am particularly intrigued by the possibilities in astrophysics. The combination of ground-based observation and satellite observation offers the hope of reconstructing the evolution of the universe. This is probably the grandest challenge that we have, but people are beginning to see it as a reality. Evidence is coming into cosmology.

One source of information is the variation in the microwave background radiation, which is the sort of ringing in the universe left over from the "big bang." Another source would be gravity waves, so that when Lygo (???) really gets moving and all theory is correct (and I have been persuaded it is but what do I know?) we should be able to pinpoint all sorts of events that are today hidden to us in the universe.

Astronomers are using instruments that are sensitive across the electromagnetic spectrum, as we said earlier. Bringing all those together to be able to characterize individual events and individual objects in the universe, should allow us to really reconstruct that evolution.

Science, as I have described it, seems to be done only to satisfy the scientist's curiosity. I know that our society supports science because it is an engine of both economic growth and personal welfare. In biology the applications are very often in medicine. So, let's think for just a moment about where great medical challenges lie for our research universities.

To my mind, the greatest is solving the mysteries of neurological disease--Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression and a host of other mental ailments. They involve misfunction of the brain. Because the brain is still a black box to us, the diseases are particularly difficult to understand.

But modern medical science will not have completed its job until we can understand these diseases and cure them. Cancer has been a target of research, very productive research, for the last 30 years. We have learned an enormous amount about the fundamental mechanisms that drive cancer cells. We know that it involves malfunction of regulatory cell growth pathways and regulatory systems of the cell and we are beginning to understand how that works.

Unfortunately, the lesions in cancer cells are genetic lesions. It makes therapy very difficult to imagine--gene therapy cannot be done on cancers because there are just too many cells involved.

But, we are making progress. There are new drugs available that are targeting the biochemical understanding we have about the cancer cell. I believe, again, that over time we will chip away at cancer and ultimately make it a disease that people can live with instead of dying.

The most frustrating challenge that I see today, because I am sort of deeply involved in it, is the attempt to make an AIDS vaccine. HIV, which causes it, is a small virus. We know everything detail about that virus--every nucleus--and we have known it for years. We do not really understand everything we need to know about how it works, showing what a remarkably complex virus it is. Although we have defined targets in it and can make drugs against those targets and thus can control, even temporarily, the growth of the virus, the way you fight a virus is with a vaccine. What I have been involved in now for five years is directing an advisory panel to the National Institute of Health to try to make an AIDS vaccine. That has been the most difficult problem I have ever seen.

The virus is very small. It has managed to allude the most powerful mechanisms of the immune system. That is why the virus grows inexorably in most people who are infected because it is already seen the immune system and knows how to deal with it. So we are trying to manipulate the virus in the immune system to induce new kinds of immunity--kinds that have never been used before to control the virus. That goes slowly. Again, we have had surprises and they are not nice.

We are still years away. Whereas I am confident in predicting that we will understand cancer, that we will understand anything that we set our mind on in biological systems, I am not confident that we will be able to deal with every disease that we come up against. And I am not confident that we will ever make an AIDS vaccine, although I would like to believe that we can and I encourage everyone and myself to think that it is possible.

Finally, the last thing I will mention is auto immune disease. We have an immune system that deals with the world outside of us, keeps it out there and does not let pathogens get the better of us. It is a fabulous system and can tell ourselves from everybody around--it knows self from non-self. But, occasionally it turns on the body. When it turns on the body, it causes disease--diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease. So we need to understand why does that tolerance break down, why do we react against ourselves, how do we prevent it?

You may hear about drugs that are being developed to treat auto immune disease, but they are all symptomatic--none of them get at the fundamental mechanisms because we do not know what they are.

This is a great challenge for us and one, again, that I believe we will meet.

One final challenge, which is not about disease but about diagnosis, is the challenge to develop instant diagnosis of infectious disease. That will guide us in our use of antiviral and antibacterial drugs, but more importantly perhaps, it can guide responses to terrorist attacks using biological weapons.

DNA is clearly the way to go because it contains the signature of each organism on Earth. We need rapid mechanisms for protecting sequence in DNA and recording it. I think we will get there on that, actually, reasonably soon.

I think that I have said enough. I had some other things I might say. So, let me end with just a last comment.

I think there are key issues facing research universities today. I have really sort of telegraphed what I am talking about. It is providing an atmosphere that maintains the collegiality and interaction among all members of the community. It allows us to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that exist today in the academic world. It is not just a matter of technologists getting together. I can give you examples of how we can have interaction between humanists and technologists, between social scientists and technologists. In fact, the whole intellectual world today can work together in very productive enterprises. But it is not something that happens naturally. Especially as campuses grow, the sense of unity among academics is becoming harder and harder to maintain. And, at the same time, the need for it has never been greater.

One answer, our answer at Cal Tech, is to stay small, but most campuses are not going to do that. They certainly are not going to shrink themselves. The answer is putting in place institutional mechanisms that catalyze interaction. They can include interdisciplinary institutes within the larger setting of the campus. They can include intermingling of different people from different backgrounds as they are trying to do now at Stanford University--housing people from different disciplines in the same building.

But I actually think what it requires is a different mind set. The disciplinary pressures on all of us are so great that the faculty really does not have much time to interact with each other, and similarly the students and post-docs feel those pressures. Ideas at the interfaces do not get conceived because people just are not finding the time to sit around and chew the fat.

We as administrators need to find ways to encourage people to have the kind of time that they can use to discuss their work with each other across the usual boundaries. We need to honor that kind of activity. We need to support it. We need to find ways to encourage it.

The issue of support, of course, is essential. Instead of putting money into buildings and into more expansion, putting money intensively into the existing program with the requirement that people think and work together, will make us more creative and more effective.

On that note, let me thank you very much for your attention. It has been a pleasure being here.