4 FRIDAY Focus The Michigan Daily - Friday, September 6, 2002 -16 ALYSSA WOOD/Daily Electrician Doug Cary goes over site plans for the life Sciences Institute. The Institute, which holds laboratories and offices, as well as one 30-person meeting space, is scheduled for completion in Fall 2003. It will be the first building of the Life Sciences Inifiative finished. WHAT TO EXPECT AND WHEN This semester A new director is 41expected to be named to replace Jack Dixon, who left in July for the University of California at San Diego. 2004 Construction on the Commons Building, located at the corner of Huron Street and Washtenaw Avenue, will end. The 99,000 square foot, six-story building is expected to have a food court, conference space and banquet hall. Fall 2003 The Life Sciences Institute will open its doors. About a half dozen faculty members, still unknown, are expected to move in soon afterwards. 2003-2005 Part of the 1,000-car Palmer Drive Parking Structure will be completed and ready for occupancy in 2003. The Pedestrian Plaza walkway will be on top of the structure, giving people 3rd-floor access to the Institute and the Commons Building and 1st-floor access to the undergraduate teaching facility, which will also be built on top of the parking structure. By 2010 Within the next five to seven years, the University's major recruitment efforts should finally be completed, LSI Managing Director Liz Barry said. December 2005 The 140,000 square-foot, $61 million Undergraduate Science Instruction Center will become the last completed building of the Initiative. 4 ALYSSA WOOD/Daily person walking around the con- truction site of the new Life Sci- ences Initiative may find it hard to imagine that by this time next yearn part.of it will be in the final stages of completion. But five days a week, approximately 400 construction workers visit the site, located at the bend across from Palmer Field where Washte- naw Avenue becomes Huron Street. From 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., electricians, carpenters, engi- neers and other workers toil away on the build- ings that comprise the Initiative, launched in 1990 under former University President Lee Bollinger. Construction on two buildings - the six- story Life Science Insti-_ tute and the 99,000 liy square-foot Commons ss an ai Building - is already feat just t underway. Work on another building, the the four-story Undergraduate Science Instruction Cen- - LSI AssociateI ter adjacent to the Insti- tute, cannot begin until the center's parking structure is finished. An overpass will connect the Commons Building to the Hill Area and an open meeting area called the Pedestrian Plaza will lead stu- dents to the Dental School. "It's a physical and intellectual bridge," LSI spokesman Karl Bates said. The area used to be the home of the North University Building, which was demolished before the project began. "The idea was to bring it there to bridge the gap. The space is pretty cramped," said Alan Saltiel, the Institute's associate director. "If you just wanted to put a building up, you would have looked at a space on North Campus. It is an architectural feat just to get it up there." But the Initiative, which will be based around genomics, chemical and structural biology, cognitive neuroscience and bioinfor- matics, is not simply a compilation of research buildings and faculty. It is also a series of undergraduate and gradu- ate courses, which are already being offered; the Values and Society Program, which looks at the moral and ethical implications of scientific advancements; and a project that officials hope will increase interaction between various cam- pus departments and schools, like the philoso- phy, medicine, law, business and arts programs. Saltiel said there are many ways the Institute and the Initiative can interact with other depart- ments. The ideas include working with the Business School on ways to adver- tise discoveries and com- missioning the School of Art and Design for artwork to add to the walls. "A lot of artists look rc tc £r Ethics and the Life Sciences," "Brain, Learning and Memory" and "Evolutionary Biology and Human Disease" - are all focused around multi-disciplinary study and interaction, said Jill Becker, chair of the Undergraduate Life Sci- ence Initiative committee. "The faculty were all very excited about the classes, and that is going to make them exciting for students," Becker said, adding that she believes undergraduate education is a large part of the Initiative. "The undergraduates need to be taught by the scientists who are doing this really dynamic research. That's what gives the undergraduates an advantage when they get out of there, is that they are trained by the best." A large part of the undergraduate education will exist in the Under- graduate Science Instruc- chitecturai tion Center, which s h an get itfup expected completion date of Fall 2005. re "The $61 million L- shaped center will house irector Alan Saltiel the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, Women in Science and Engineering and the Life Sciences Values and Society Pro- gram, as well as classroom, computer labs, teaching labs and a lecture hall. "The'intent of this is to ... make this under- graduate science center diverse and welcoming to groups that are not necessarily associated with science and technology," said Cell and Molecular Biology Prof. Pamela Raymond. "This will allow an environment where students will not only be in classrooms, but also engaged in other academic activities." rrently, the site is covered in dust, ooden boards and two-by-fours. A temporary rickety wooden staircase leads to the second floor of the Life Science Institute, dubbed the Mechanical Room, where pipes for heat and ventilation fill up much of the room's space. Later, workers will add the machines that will heat and cool the 240,000 square-foot building. The roof already holds the building's main electrical equipment, which Plant Extension Project Engineer Ken Silverman said is "ready to roll." A blue freight elevator with wire walls car- ries construction workers from floor to floor, where office walls and laboratory and equip- ment spaces are being constructed on floors four, five and six. Though there are walls around the outside now, there is no glass in the windows and few areas are constructed with the six types of stone that will eventually give the building its fin- ished appearance. On several floors there are no or few separations between rooms, and those visiting must use their imaginations, or the site plan, to figure out where the offices will be. Mice will eventually live in the building's There will be four labs on each floor, for a total of 12, and each lab will fit 30 to 35 researchers. Instead of being separated from one another, the labs will be positioned next to each other, and scientists will use shared equip- ment, all in an effort to encourage as much' communication and interaction as possible. Office spaces will be located on the short ends of the building, next to each other instead of being connected directly to the labs. "This is the new approach to doing labs. We are not the only ones doing this," Bates said. "People who are building laboratory space around the country are doing this." L he competing universities are part of the nitiative's number one challenge: ecruitment of the best scientists and researchers in the country. Though few University officials say they believe the LSI will have a problem convincing researchers to move to Michigan, they all acknowledge that recruitment is the top priority and many say the competition will defer the best from accepting positions here. "To be a really great university in the next century, the University of Michigan will a a ALYSSA WOOD/Daily Carpenter Joe Diaz Installs drywall on the sixth floor of the Life Sciences Institute Tuesday afternoon. Diaz Is one of 400 construction workers participating on the project. Each floor of the $100 million Institute Is the size of a football field. have to be great in the life sciences. The Institute will be one part of making Michigan "The joh great for science," said ,N,0 Liz Barry, the Institute's Jump flng managing director. "Our best scien focus in the next few years is going to be recruiting the best scien- tists we can find and - LSI Managit then supporting them well so that they can do their research." "Like Michigan, other leading universities recognize that to be truly great in the next cen- tury, they will have to be great in the sciences," she added. "All of the usual suspects are trying to make great strides in these areas." Harvard University, the University of Califor- nia at San Francisco and at Berkeley, the Cali- fornia Institute of Technology, Cornell University, Stanford University and Duke Uni- versity are all launching or building initiatives in the Life Sciences. "Competition for talent is atrocious. Every- body we've talked to has had feelers from other schools as well," Bates said. "We're all recruit- ing a lot of the same scientists.' Also, the University has already lost two key people to the University of California at San Diego - Jack Dixon and Scott Emr, the Insti- tute's original co-directors. Scott Emr, who would have come to Michi- gan from San Diego, announced in January that he had changed his mind, citing Bollinger's departure as one of his reasons. Jack Dixon, who had directed the Institute since July 2001, made his announcement this summer. He left for Califor- nia.whr in in lng his undergraduate and Ph.D. studies, to become San Diego's Health Sciences Dean for Scientif- ic Affairs. "We're going to lose out on some of those people, of course. We are competing against those schools," Saltiel said. But Saltiel said Michigan has several benefits that other schools don't have, including the quality of life in Ann Arbor and the University's reputation in the life sciences, which he said is strong because of the Medical School and dis- coveries, such as the polio vaccine that was developed in 1955 by University scientists Jonas Salk and Thomas Francis. He added that the University is also known for its genetics work. It started the nation's first human genetics program, directed by James Neel, in 1940. But, he and others, including Barry and Uni- versity President Mary Sue Coleman, said the best attraction the University has to offer scien- tists is the strength of its other departments. "Berkeley doesn't have a medical school. ... (The University of California at San Fran- cisco) is really mainly a medical school. They don't have undergraduates, they don't have engineering, they don't have chemistry," Saltiel said. "(Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology) has a famous it will be institute called the w t Whitehead Institute, and with the it's an outstanding place fists in the but it also doesn't have a medical school" try."The commitment to the life sciences made by g Director Liz Barry the University will also attract attention this way, Barry said. To date, the University has set aside $700 million toward life sciences facilities, recruiting and hiring - the Institute itself is a $100 mil- lion building. Also, the State of Michigan has pledged sup- port for the Life Sciences Corridor through its tobacco settlement for the next 20 years. The corridor is a billion-dollar initiative largely sup- ported by the state, Pfizer Inc. and Pharmacia Corp. that assists in collaboration between Michigan universities and companies. "The commitment that the University has made to this area is really staggering. Both the funds and the institutional pledge are signifi- cant," Barry said. Despite the competition, Barry said she sees great things in the Institute's future. "Five to 10 years from now, what we will have is a very bustling building," she said. "The joint will be jumping with the best sci- entists in the country, all working on scientific problems and making great progress in under- standing life." And Barry said she's not just being opti- mistic. "I think it's quite realistic;' she added. e .ri.. .. ' i . ,: ..,,yam''. i , _ o 1