Even the most monumental buildings and public structures are nothing more than wood, brick, steel, glass—and at Stanford, of course, sandstone and tile. Yet, over time, some structures gain a presence that transcends the materials with which they were built. The Roman Forum, the pyramids at Teotihuacan and the Great Wall came to represent cultures, significant human achievements and great social movements. They are imbued not only with history but also with the ideas that surrounded their creation and the spirit of the people who were connected to them.
At Stanford, buildings speak powerfully to our sense of place and our history. The Quad memorializes the vision of Jane and Leland Stanford. But Stanford’s buildings also reflect the University’s future. This fall, two dedications reminded us of how our vision of the future is inextricably tied to our past.
In mid-October, we formally dedicated the William R. Hewlett and David Packard Science and Engineering Quadrangle. Bill and Dave, whose combined $77 million gift made the buildings possible, represented the best of what our alumni bring to the world. Their inventive, entrepreneurial nature and their belief in the importance of individuals made the HP Way synonymous with the visionary leadership and technological innovations of Silicon Valley.
Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett believed in investing in the next generation and in the importance of education. The Science and Engineering Quad is more than a memorial to them—it’s a reminder that two of Stanford’s closest friends believed in the future and the University’s role in making that future a good one.
Just across the road stands another new building. A few days following the dedication of the Hewlett and Packard quadrangle, we dedicated the James H. Clark Center. The new building is named for another Silicon Valley pioneer, philanthropist, former Stanford professor—and my officemate in the early 1980s. The Clark Center is a stunningly beautiful building, designed to inspire the imagination while fostering collaboration among faculty from more than 20 departments in four different schools.
The Clark Center heralds a new era for Stanford while expanding our commitment to research that will enhance people’s lives. This new era in scholarship is marked by the increasing necessity of crossing disciplinary boundaries to solve the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. The center will be home base for Bio-X, Stanford’s multidisciplinary initiative to bring biology, engineering, medicine and the basic sciences to bear on some of humanity’s most daunting health problems.
Such problems cannot be addressed with the knowledge and expertise of a single discipline. Fundamental research in the biosciences often calls for collaboration with physicists and chemists. Translational biomedical research requires that basic scientists, engineers and clinicians work together to create new treatments for disease.
Bio-X and the new department of bioengineering—the first department at Stanford to be jointly housed in two schools—represent our commitment to the future of collaborative, multidisciplinary teaching and research. These efforts also embody the willingness to be pioneers in new areas of scholarship and new ways of undertaking our research and teaching mission.
To facilitate the crossing of boundaries and establishment of research collaborations, we created the Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program (IIP), which provides seed funding; it has already underwritten 40 projects. Some may fail, but one measure of early success is the awarding of outside funding, and two of our seed projects have already achieved this recognition. The National Institutes of Health awarded Stanford a five-year grant to extend a pilot course on cross-disciplinary training for diabetes research. That course, funded by IIP, educated graduate students in the biological sciences, bioinformatics and bioengineering about the disease so that they can apply their specialized skills to clinical problems. Another seed grant from IIP funded development of proteomics technology focused on two autoimmune diseases. Now the NIH is providing additional support for the multidisciplinary work being done in the Stanford Proteomics Center with a $14.6 million contract.
I hope the next time you are at the Farm you will visit the Hewlett and Packard quadrangle and the Clark Center. I am certain you will appreciate their architectural beauty and technological prowess. But I also hope that you will see in them the expression of something even more important—Stanford’s commitment to be a pioneer in the creation of new fields and the generation of knowledge.
