Douglas Melton displays a plate that holds gene clones that are systematically arranged into 384 tiny wells. The robot to Melton's left, called 'Q' BOT, does the arranging. Photo by Jon Chase.

David Nelson holds a model of a defect in a biological membrane; behind him is a mecular model of a metal alloy. Photo by Jon Chase.

Stuart Schreiber notes that the new center for Genomics and Proteomics will feature the kind of interdisciplinary research that attracts the best students and faculty. Photo by Kris Snibbe.

A plan to enrich scientific research and education is under way at Harvard, with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) launching several initiatives that will probe some of the most challenging and potentially rewarding areas of science today.

Early last summer, FAS Dean Jeremy R. Knowles convened a group of six faculty colleagues to help identify critical fields of current and future scientific research, to pinpoint areas that will enhance Harvard's ability to recruit creative faculty and attract talented students, and to devise ways to foster collaborative efforts in research and education within and across disciplinary lines.

"Outstanding scientific research often occurs at the boundaries of traditional disciplines," Knowles said, "and an institution like Harvard must continually seek the most exciting and fruitful areas of inquiry."

The FAS initiative is part of a University-wide effort to address issues of scientific education and research. "We are in a period of remarkable scientific discovery that will clearly continue long into the future and will yield enormous benefits to society," said President Neil L. Rudenstine. "Enabling our faculty and students to keep fully abreast, as well as to lead, will require the kind of new investments that Harvard has determined to undertake."

The FAS "summer science group" --David Nelson (physics), H.T. Kung (computer science and electrical engineering), Michael McElroy (earth and planetary sciences), Daniel Hartl (biology), Douglas Melton (cellular and molecular biology), and Stuart Schreiber (chemistry and chemical biology) --proposed to create several clusters that will draw on expertise from a range of academic departments, and that will allow for sharing of facilities and equipment that single researchers can neither afford nor sustain. Two of these -- a center for Genomics and Proteomics and a center for Imaging and Mesoscale Structures -- will be provided with start- up funding immediately. Other areas under consideration include: the exploration of the connections between single nerve cells and the behavior of complex organisms, the design of sophisticated Web search engines to assist in scientific research, and the investigation of links between evolution and global climate change.

"In some areas," Knowles said, "we must focus on recruiting new faculty. In others, the prime need is for equipment, technical support, and space."

With Harvard's capital campaign in its last, critical, year, and the excellent returns on its endowment in recent years, Knowles said, "This is the moment to reshape our operations, to chart new directions, and to plan major investments for the coming decade." The FAS will commit between $150 million and $200 million to these initiatives over the next five years, though each new center will be expected, by that time, to raise sufficient funds from government agencies, corporations, and individual donors to secure its future.

The Board of Overseers' Committee on Natural and Applied Sciences has strongly encouraged these proposals. Two committee members, Nobel laureates Torsten Wiesel and J. Michael Bishop, stress that the effort is of great importance to the scientific community.

Wiesel, past president of the Rockefeller University, said, "I am delighted over the decision to make this major investment in the support and development of the sciences at Harvard University. The science initiative is timely and crucial and will make it possible for Harvard to maintain its pre-eminent position in science, research, and education."

"With this investment," said Bishop, chancellor and professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of California, San Francisco, "Harvard will position itself to make landmark advances in the biological sciences and to provide visionary training for a new generation of scientists."

The new center for Genomics and Proteomics will build on the dramatic change in research in this area, which has until recently focused on understanding how single genes are regulated and how the proteins derived from them function. The center's research will involve faculty in Biology, Chemistry, and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. It will concentrate on exploiting new chip technology to understand the behavior of whole cells, which should lead to a better view of animal behavior, evolution, the multigenic basis of diseases, and other complex biological phenomena. It will also explore how these biological processes can be controlled using small molecules.

Advances in chemistry, biology, chemical and classical genetics, engineering and materials, and computer sciences have converged to make it possible to study the entire collection of an organism's genes (the genome), which encodes the complete set of its proteins (the proteome). Schreiber said that this kind of convergence is important to Harvard's educational mission. "Many students are attracted to interdisciplinary research because it is intellectually challenging and stimulating, and is increasingly important in modern science," he said. "This center creates real links between FAS departments and provides a laboratory environment with input from numerous areas of science and engineering."

According to Melton, the consequence in terms of research is that "one student can experimentally probe every member of a genome or proteome in a single experiment [and get] an integrated picture of the response of an entire organism." The result, he said, is "a change in our view of living systems."

Nelson helped to plan for the Imaging and Mesoscale Structures center, which will focus on the study of extremely small structures. Applications from this research could include the design of ever- smaller computer processors with tremendous increases in speed and capacity. Nelson said that apart from the significant impact the center's work may have on society, it also will boost the faculty's research agenda. "My colleagues and I see this as a pursuit of enormous intellectual excitement," he said. "The laws of mechanics and electrical circuits, familiar from everyday experience, break down in the region we'll be exploring. We'll be looking at new materials that will provide a chance for revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, advances in many areas of science and technology."

The Imaging and Mesoscale Structures center -- planned, with Nelson, by Charles Lieber (chemistry), Robert Westervelt (physics and engineering and applied sciences), and others -- will promote research on structures of approximately 1 to 100 nanometers in size (a nanometer is one one-billionth of a meter). Nelson says such research could lead to important advances in fields like electronics (including computer processors and fiber optic communications), and in our understanding of how biomaterials in this size-range, like DNA and proteins, function.

"As we drive downward in scale we can add more and more electrical and mechanical elements to the smallest computer chip now made," he said. "And bottom-up synthesis of mesoscale structures can provide the building blocks for completely new technologies."

Lieber said that the imaging center is developing technology that could lead to critical advances in biological research and medicine. For instance, once a technique such as magnetic resonance imaging detects a tumor, the growth already has significant size. "The tumor might be caused by a mutation -- a single molecular alteration -- in the genome or by the invasion of a viral agent," Lieber said. "If one could detect the initial molecular change that ultimately produces the tumor, one would have a much better chance of fighting it in a noninvasive way."

Lieber and his colleagues (such as Sunney Xie, who will soon join the Chemistry Department) are working to create optical and scanning probe technologies to image things as small as individual proteins, and even smaller molecules. They are developing optical methods and special nanometer-sized probes to create images that are sensitive to molecular properties. "We have billions of proteins," he said. "But only one of them initially changes. You need instruments with extremely high sensitivity to see that."

Several other projects to support the sciences are already under way at Harvard, coming on the heels of recent renovations for several humanities departments in the Barker Center and Boylston Hall, and concurrent with planning for the renovation of Widener Library and for the Knafel Center and Littauer Center for the social sciences. The Maxwell Dworkin Building and the Naito Laboratory, both now in construction, will provide laboratory, classroom, and office space for faculty and students in computer science and electrical engineering, and in chemistry and chemical biology. A new $20-million telescope in Chile will expand the research capabilities of Harvard astronomers and astrophysicists, and eight new faculty positions have now been endowed for the physical and life sciences.

Knowles said that both graduate students and undergraduates will reap benefits from the science initiative. "Our students will have the opportunity to work with, and learn from, the faculty who will lead these new efforts --and will themselves be in a position to shape the future of scientific research and discovery," he said.

"Having taken important steps this year to ensure that Harvard remains accessible to the best undergraduates and graduate students, we must now take care to secure the excellence in science that attracts students and faculty alike."