A New Home for the Life Sciences

The University's largest capital project, Frank Hall features 169,000 square feet, 30 labs, and an MRI machine

by Wendy Y. Lawton

When the new Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life Sciences opens on Meeting Street, its five stories of laboratory and learning space will be devoted to the study of how life works. Why do we age? How do we learn? Can we interpret the pop-and-crackle language of the brain? How do we develop from a single cell into an organism containing about 100 trillion?

Faculty, staff, and students from the Departments of Neuroscience and Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry working in Frank Hall will pursue these and other fascinating, fundamental questions about the human body – how it is built, how it works, how it grows, how it changes over a lifetime and across generations. Their scientific search will be celebrated when Frank Hall is dedicated on October 6.

A variety of events will take place at the dedication. From 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m., the general public may tour the building. At twilight, members of the Corporation and the Frank family, along with staff and faculty from the Division of Biology and Medicine, will gather to watch as the building is lit by klieg lights. Susan Hockfield, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a noted neuroscientist, will give the keynote address and receive an honorary degree. Hockfield is the first life scientist to lead MIT.

The building is named for New York businessman Sidney E. Frank, a member of the Brown Class of 1942, who died this year. Frank was the University's biggest donor and the $95-million building is the University's largest capital project.

Frank Hall features 169,000 square feet of space, which includes 62 offices, 30 laboratories, 10 conference rooms and a 98-seat seminar room. Frank Hall will hold the University's main biomedical imaging facility as well as a new 3-Tesla Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine.

"Enhancing our capabilities in the basic biological sciences has been a major goal," President Ruth J. Simmons said. "We are expanding and strengthening our offerings and giving faculty the resources to conduct rigorous science and produce excellent scholarship."

The new building – with its soaring atrium, spiral staircase and art glass bridge – is the most dramatic example of Brown's commitment to the life sciences.

Since 2002, the University has hired nineteen tenure-track professors in the biological sciences, public health, and medicine, and has a goal to hire twenty more. In the last three years, it opened the Laboratories for Molecular Medicine at 70 Ship Street, forged a research and education affiliation with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and launched several major research programs, such as the Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine and the Center for Computational Molecular Biology.

"The life and health sciences are undergoing a renaissance at Brown," said Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Eli Y. Adashi, M.D. "We are gaining significant ground in every area, and a sense of excitement and shared purpose is palpable."

The research center will be home to thirty-nine professors of biology or medical science. Their work is wide-ranging, touching on development and disease, behavior and genes. Some scientists go deep in their experimental approach, studying the inner workings of cells or the body's instruction manual encoded in DNA. Other faculty cast a broad net, studying networks of neurons or the contents of entire genomes. Although the science is basic bench, the knowledge it creates can help improve human health. Faculty in Frank Hall investigate the causes of, or treatments for, a variety of diseases and conditions, including pain and paralysis, infertility and infection, birth defects and mental retardation.

For the biologists, working side by side will have its rewards. Some neuroscientists use molecular methods in their research; some biochemists and cell and molecular biologists study the nervous system. The two departments already share students; now they will be able to share ideas daily.

Sharing Their Sense of Excitement

Several professors who will work in the new Sidney E. Frank Hall for Life Sciences were asked about why biology is exciting today and where the science will take us. Here are excerpts from those conversations. - Wendy Y. Lawton

"Biology is at an exciting time as the gulf is narrowing between basic and applied research. It is becoming increasingly common for the same lab to study basic molecular and cellular mechanisms and to apply this understanding to clinical problems. The unique union of biology and medicine at Brown has the potential to further the liaison between basic scientists and clinicians, positioning the university well for future advances."

- Susan Gerbi, professor, Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry

It's really exciting to be a biologist right now because we are finally becoming aware of the extent to which humans share a common thread, a DNA thread, with all living organisms. This is an unbroken history for all of us. None of us ever, ever had an ancestor who left no offspring. In this history, there are common pages handed down through the ages speaking to ancient processes necessary for the success of all. As well, there are pages that tell just about being an ant, or an aardvark. The hitch is, we do not immediately know how to tell one from the other. When we are finally literate in these archives, which the genome revolution has made possible, we will know much more about ourselves and why things go wrong. Now, we just have to learn how to read."

- Robert Reenan, professor, Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry

"For the past several centuries, science has followed a mostly reductionist approach. Complex objects, from stars to molecules, have been fairly well understood by breaking them down into their individual constituents and figuring out how the constituents work. This approach has provided a lot of basic understanding in physics as well as in biology. This reductionist research has paved the way for a new kind of science in this century: the science of complex systems. These systems include the dynamics of groups of proteins to generate biological functions, the dynamics of groups of neurons to generate behavior of an individual, and the dynamics of groups of individuals to generate cultures.

- Mayank Mehta, assistant professor, Department of Neuroscience

"As Niels Bohr said, 'Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.' But the unpredictability of science is one of the reasons it is fun to be a scientist. If I were to bet on some possibilities for the coming decades: We will decode much of the neural language of the brain; We will understand how and where memories are stored; We will be able to replace certain parts of the brain when they are damaged; We will figure out how to prevent or cure some of the most devastating neurological and psychiatric diseases. And there will still be many important unsolved questions about how the brain works."

- Barry Connors, professor and chair, Department of Neuroscience

"I'm always struck by the elegance and simplicity of biological mechanisms. Once you figure a signaling pathway, decode a sequence, solve a structure, it makes so much sense. You wonder what took you so long and why no one saw the solution before. I hope a major breakthrough will be the solution to how the brain is wired and how memories are formed and recalled. I see this as analogous to solving the structure of DNA. There are so many pieces of the puzzle in place, but I believe there will be an "aha moment" when someone will see realize how the brain stores and retrieves information. And the solution will be simple and elegant.

- Diane Lipscombe, professor, Department of Neuroscience

"Each discovery in biology now means a direct translation to a health-related issue. No matter if the discovery was made in a fly, a worm, or a mouse, the general understanding of how evolution works means that many of these discoveries are directly translatable into a health-related benefit. Gene therapy, stem cells, designer drugs, and the immediacy of translation to patients means that the heath-care system will be constantly trying to catch up."

- Gary Wessel, professor, Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry