The Fall and Rise of Stanley Hall

By Genevieve Shiffrar, April 14, 2003

Stanley Hall, which housed faculty in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, has been demolished in preparation for a new, state-of-the-art Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility. Over 50 years old and no longer meeting seismic codes, the old building was destroyed in a few days.

The new facility will provide approximately 40 laboratories as part of QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research. QB3 is a collaborative effort of three University of California campuses—Berkeley, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. The mission of the institute is to better understand important biological and medical problems using quantitative methods such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, and engineering.

The original intentions of Stanley Hall reflect very well this future program. Constructed in 1952, it was named originally the Biochemistry and Virology Laboratory Building. Wendell Meredith Stanley, then Chair of the Biochemistry Department and Director of the Virology Laboratory, desired the two units to be in close proximity to each other for the cross-pollination of ideas. The building was renamed later the Molecular Biology and Virology Laboratory when it housed the Molecular Biology Department. It was renamed again, in honor of Professor Stanley for his achievements as a scientist, an educational administrator, and a scientific statesman. His work characterizing the tobacco mosaic virus revolutionized much biological thought and won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946.

As the future home of QB3, the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility will continue the goal of fostering interdisciplinary research focused on biology. Stanley will contain laboratories for faculty in the College of Letters & Science and classrooms as it always has, but with three times the floor space, the new building will include as well laboratory space for faculty in the College of Chemistry and the College of Engineering.

Governor Gray Davis established QB3 with state and private funds in 2000, advancing significantly Berkeley's Health Sciences Initiative. Along with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), QB3 forms part of Davis's new California Institutes of Science and Innovation.

According to Stanley construction site project manager Robert Bluhm, "The facility will be an architectural example of the new paradigm for interdisciplinary research, providing exceptionally flexible and modular laboratories for constantly evolving teams and initiatives." With the concept of interdisciplinarity extended into the architecture, scientists will be in close proximity to researchers from different fields. The aim is to make routine the integration of the quantitative and biological sciences.

Together, these scientists will work towards making fundamental discoveries for the benefit of human health. For example, they will develop new technologies and products for the treatment and prevention of diseases such as AIDS, Alzheimer's, and cancer. New surgery procedures will be developed, improved artificial tissue and joints will be designed, and the human genome will be better understood.

Much new technology will be housed in the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility. A nanotechnology center (part of CITRIS) will include the equipment necessary to make incredibly small instruments from sheets of atoms. Visualization resources will include a 900 megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance machine to make exquisite images of anatomical detail less than a millimeter in size. Computers with the ability to analyze very large amounts of information will crunch biological data to decipher genetic patterns across large populations.

For Mark Richards, Dean of the Physical Sciences, and Geoff Owen, Dean of the Biological Sciences, QB3 research will be particularly exciting. According to Richards, "Bringing the physical sciences to bear on biological questions is sure to advance our understanding of the human system. It wouldn't surprise me if the repercussions of this research in the long term will prompt the opposite to come true: we learn more about the larger system in which we live, as well."