carnegie institution: at 100, still in its prime
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COVER STORY
PIONEERS Berry (left! and Field are setting up the department of global ecology, the first new department since 19K.
CARNEGIE INSTITUTION: AT 100, STILL IN ITS PRIME By turning loose its enthusiastic scientists to probe whatever takes their fancy, the institution stays nimble and productive a century after its founding
SOPHIE L. WILKINSON, C&EN WASHINGTON
• M WM F YOU'RE A SCIENTIST, THIS HAS GOTTO BE ONE OF THE
I most ideal places on the planet to work," says Wesley I T. Huntress Jr., director of the Geophysical Laborato-I ry (GL) of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. M His GL colleague Russell J. Hemley a chemist,
backs him up, noting that the institution's "staff positions tend to be cherished." Spend anytime at all with the keen scientists at this private, nonprofit research institution that was endowed
by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago, and youll be bound to agree with their assessment.
Even those researchers who depart to continue their careers elsewhere tend to recall their time at Carnegie fondly "We take pride that so many of our former colleagues have told us, Ί feel like I did some of my best work when I was here,' " says Allan C. Spradling, director of Carnegie's department of embryology
Notwithstanding these glowing endorsements, and despite being peopled with stellar scientists, Carnegie is something of a stealth institution. Even Hunt-
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ress, who grew up near one of the institution's two Washington, D.C., sites, didn't realize the campus existed until he was recruited to join the organization.
On the other hand, outsiders who are familiar with its scientific reputation are startled by Carnegie's small size. When visiting scientists arrive at one of its sites, they're likely to ask where the rest of the place is; the output of papers has led them to expect a much larger scientific staff. For instance, the Geophysical Lab's 15 staff scientists and two dozen postdocs publish about 100 papers per year, says Robert M. Hazen, a GL experimental mineralogist.
THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION is unusual in that its researchers investigate a broad range of topics, including embryology, developmental molecular biology, plant biology, ecology, cosmology and astrophysics, geochemistry, cosmochemistry, and crystallography That contrasts with most other small, independent research institutes— such as the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, or the Marine Biological Laboratory—which focus on a single field, often biomedical science, says Carnegie President Maxine F. Singer.
Carnegie is increasingly unique in another sense, Huntress notes. "There used to be more of this kind of institution, whose function was pure fundamental research in physics and chemistry" One example he points to is Bell Labs, which in its heyday conducted the basic research that led to the invention of the transistor. "Can you imagine this world, this economy, without the transistor?" Huntress decries industry's move away from fundamental research, worrying that "we will get to the point where applied research will run out of new fundamental discoveries upon which to work."
In some ways, the lives of Carnegie researchers resemble those of their colleagues in academia. But the Carnegie staff enjoys substantially more freedom. Carnegie Observatories Director Augustus Oemler Jr., who spent two decades as a professor at Yale University, says: "The most substantial difference is the single-minded agenda of the Carnegie, which is the pursuit of science. The agenda of a university involves everything from making sure students get their flu shots, to making sure the basketball team wins, to the rela
tionship with the local community It's a worthy but extremely long agenda. Carnegie cares about nothing but the work that the scientist is doing."That manifests itself in numerous ways, not least of which is that nearly "every penny that comes into the institution is going to do science," Oemler says.
On the other hand, Carnegie researchers give up the security enjoyed by senior academic colleagues. 'At a university, as you get on in years, maybe you can't stay at the cutting edge of research," explains Christopher R. Somerville, director of the department of plant biology "But there are other useful things for you to do. Y)u can move more heavily into teaching or administration. But if somebody at Carnegie starts moving away from the leading edge of their field, that can be a problem. There's no tenure. There's no alternative to research."
Researchers are evaluated every five years by their directors, who rely exten-
SINGER "Our primary goal is to produce new knowledge that should be—if it can be—applied to the welfare of people."
sively on input from scientists outside the institution. Unlike their academic counterparts, Carnegie scientists "are not judged on the number of papers they write, but more on the substance," Singer says. "That gives them a chance to take long shots and spend some years at some novel, original scientific question."
Carnegie's willingness to take the long
view encourages its researchers to venture into unfamiliar territory Marilyn L. Fogel, a GLbiogeochemist, says, "If you're open to things like interdisciplinary problems, or interested in changing your field or learning something new, or pursuing anything that you haven't done before in your educational experience, there is every opportunity for you to do that."
That freedom prevents the researchers from getting stale. Hazen, an expert in high-pressure crystallography, reached a point where "every time I went in the laboratory and did an experiment, I sort of knew what was going to happen." He was ready to shift to another field—a move that would have been almost impossible at a university "It would be academic suicide to say, I 'm not doing that anymore.' "
But at Carnegie, the response to his declaration was, "Great! Take a fewyears. % u don't have to get a grant. Just study the field, and see what kinds of questions are out there." So Hazen is now studying possible roles of minerals in prebiotic synthesis, selection, and organization of organic molecules—processes that may have contributed to the origin of life.
Fogel says the absence of pigeonholing at Carnegie is possible because "we don't have a formal teaching structure where we're assigned to a class. Most academic people have a link between their research and their teaching, and they're in a department that expects them to do certain things. "I have a Ph.D. in botany, and I am involved in projects as diverse as developing an instrument to find life on Mars, studying the archaeology and anthropology of ancient humans, and tracking chicken wastes on Maryland's Eastern Shore," he says. "I couldn't do all of those things in the setting of a university department. What department would I be in?"
THIS UNCONSTRAINED atmosphere has attracted researchers with degrees in biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology to the Geophysical Lab, Hazen says. "And they're all talking to each other." That's typical of the institution's other departments as well.
The department of terrestrial magnetism (DTM) runs a "lunch club" that promotes such interaction. Participating staff members cook lunches for the staff's club members for an entire week. Larry R. Nitt-ler, a cosmochemist in the department, ad-
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mits that the chef/researchers "don't get much work done" during their week on duty And members have to abide by three rules: "%u can't serve hot dogs more than once a week. You can't get seconds until 12:45 PM. And no official complaints are allowed." Most of the cooks are "at least competent," he says. 'And some are so fantastic you schedule your life around their cooking."
Spradling adds that "there's a great deal of collegiality in the institution, more than perhaps any other place I know. We all have labs that are about the same size, and we share almost all equipment and the resources of the department. So there's an immediate feeling that you are an equal, important member of a community of scientists."
ADDING TO the egalitarian atmosphere is the fact that there's no hierarchy among the scientists, Singer says. When young people are hired, "they have the same rank—although not the same salary—as a senior person." Salaries for the scientific staff members range from $75,000 to $179,000 per year.
The egalitarian tone carries through to the management structure of the entire institution. Singer characterizes the Carnegie Institution as being "completely decentralized. We have almost no institutional rules or regulations-Each of the depart-
FIELDW0RK Postdoc Matthew Wooler (left) accompanied Fogel to Twin Cays in Belize to study the biogeochemistry and ecology of mangrove trees and microbial mats.
ments operates like a small research institution on its own. By and large, the day-today management, the direction of research, is left to the directors of each department."
And the directors believe that the scientists themselves are the best judges of what scientific track to follow "The fundamental philosophy within the Carnegie is to invest heavily in finding people who can take advantage of the opportunity, and then giving them the freedom and support to follow their ideas, and not put any barriers in their way," Somerville says.
Of course, the institution wouldn't suit everyone. Most of its research groups have fewer than 10 members, "which is modest these days," Singer says. And those who want to teach might also find that it isn't the most suitable place, she adds. However, two departments— embryology and plant biology—provide teaching opportunities at Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities, respectively And staff members in other Carnegie departments can work out similar arrangements if they are so inclined.
Oemler says that "the people who can best be successful—maybe only successful at the Carnegie—are the ones who have the long-term perspective. That is something we can provide to the progress of science that most other places can't. It's not that a successful Carnegie practitioner can't work in a mode which produces
"The single thing that makes Carnegie a unique place is the degree to which we're able to encourage our young scientists to take risks and to do the nonconventional."
ALL WET Carnegie's community outreach programs introduce Washington, D.C., students to the joys of hands-on science with materials such as water-absorbent polymers in diapers.
quick, short-term results. But that person isn't taking the maximum advantage of what Carnegie has to offer."
Oemler points to the work of Edwin Ε Hubble, a staff member at Carnegie's observatories from 1919 through 1953, as an example. Working over the course of several decades, Hubble and his collaborators determined that the Milky Way is just one among billions of similar galaxies and that
the universe is expanding. The Carnegie Institu
tion would be a congenial home for those "people who have ideas that they would like to pursue, but they feel quite uncertain as to whether they could get the standard kind of support from grants to do that," Singer says. The institution doesn't spurn federal grants, however. Its departments rely on grants for anywhere from 11 to 57% of funding.
Nevertheless, an avenue of research that can attract grants isn't nec
essarily "best in the long run for a really novel contribution to science," Spradling says. "So the single thing that makes Carnegie a unique place is the degree to which we're able to encourage our young scientists to take risks and to do the unconventional," he adds.
Despite the freedoms afforded by its $500 million endowment, Carnegie scientists can still find their hands tied. "The problem with finding the most 'out there' project is that we do our research mostly
with postdocs and, to some extent, graduate students," Somerville says. "I do all the crazy experiments that my students and postdocs can't do because they can't afford too many failures."
The students at Carnegie include "predocs"—graduate students who work at the lab as well as at the university from which they'll earn their doctorate—as well as graduate and undergraduate summer research interns.
The institution also welcomes numerous visiting scientists. And it runs a staff associate program for "people who are less proven," Somerville says. After spending up to five years in the program, an associate may subsequently move on to a faculty position at a university
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Carnegie Scientists Are Scattered Worldwide
H eadquartered in Washington, D.C., the Carnegie Institution includes six departments dispersed over four sites in the U.S. and one in Chile:
• Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Washington, DC, established in 1904. This division's purview has moved beyond its roots in magnetism to include astronomy, cosmochemistry, geochemistry, seismology, and the search for planets around other stars. Applications could range from earthquake warning systems to computer models of solar system formation and insights into the origin of impact craters. The department currently has 15 staff members, an average of 25 postdoctoral fellows, and approximately eight graduate students.
• Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, Calif., 1904. This unit's research concerns the structure and dimensions of the universe and the physical nature, chemical composition, and evolution of stars and galaxies. Data come from the multitelescope Las Cam-panas Observatory near Las Serena, Chile, as well as from national facilities such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The department has 12 staff members and 12 postdocs.
• Geophysical Laboratory, Washington, D.C., 1905. This department, which is recognized for its expertise in high-pressure physics, chemistry, and materials research, also conducts research in petrology (the physics and chemistry of rocks), biological geochemistry, astrochemistry, and astrobiology. The work helps explain the constitution of the interior of Earth and the other planets, planetary evolution, the chemical origins of biology, and the fundamental properties of materials. The department has 15 staff members, one staff associate, about 25 postdocs, and five grad students.
• Department of Embryology, Baltimore, 19U. This branch has
shifted from its original focus on human embryo development to studies of the developmental biology of yeast, frogs, fruit flies, fish, and other organisms. The department's research into genetic and cellular functions could ultimately help to prevent cancer, birth defects, and retardation. The department has eight staff members, four staff associates, 30 postdocs, and 15 grad students.
• Department of Plant Biology, Stanford, Calif., 1928, an outgrowth of the Carnegie Institution's Desert Laboratory, established in 1903 in Tucson, Ariz. This unit, which has its own buildings on seven acres of the Stanford University campus, carries out studies ranging in scale from the molecular mechanisms underlying plant disease to broad-ranging ecological research. The work is linked by a desire to understand and ameliorate the negative environmental consequences of human population growth. Advances should afford a better comprehension of plant genetics, leading to improved crop yields and pest resistance, as well as expanding the range of food, fiber, and other products that can be derived from plants. The department has eight staff members, two staff associates, about 30 postdocs, and a dozen grad students.
• Department of Global Ecology, Stanford, 2002. Intended to increase understanding of the interactions between Earth's ecosystems, this department will explore such issues as the role of vegetation in moderating climate and the relationship between small-scale properties such as biochemistry in leaf cells to large-scale ecosystem properties such as global patterns of carbon sequestration. Potential applications include strategies for storing carbon in ecosystems; methods for quantifying impacts of climate change; and techniques for ensuring the sus-tainability of the biosphere, such as engineering microbes to combat the greenhouse gas N20. The department is expected to have five or six staff members and approximately 30 postdocs and grad students.
or in some cases may be hired at Carnegie as a staff member.
Carnegie is not focused solely on the scientific community It also conducts external outreach efforts, which are largely concentrated in Washington.
In 1989, Singer started the First Light program for third through sixth graders from the institution's neighborhood in downtown Washington. The program, which is free to students, is funded in large part by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Each Saturday, the kids start with a morning science class at the institution's majestic headquarters building on 16th Street, less than a mile from the White House. Gregory W Taylor, the program's coordinator and lead teacher, says the classes are hands-on and inquiry based. In a lesson on polymers, for instance, the students start by trying to guess how much water a disposable diaper can hold. They then pour
200 mL of tap water into the diaper every minute until it starts leaking—which usually takes a liter of water. After that they tease the diaper apart to examine the water-absorbent sodium polyacrylate polymer it contains. Taylor notes this is a "sneaky way" to teach kids about polymers and the metric system—and it's much more appealing to kids than a serious lecturer in a lab coat.
After lunch they head off on a field trip to further whet their scientific appetite. Atypical expedition might involve an outing on a local river, with lessons in navigation, water salinity, and identification of fish species.
Singer says the program is a hit with the children. "Parents come to us and say, Ί can hardly get this child out of bed during the week to get him to school, but on Saturday, he's always ready to get out of bed to go to First Light.'"
Singer also launched the Carnegie Acad
emy for Science Education. Started in 1994, this year-round program provides teachers from Washington's public elementary schools with training and supplies so they can incorporate science into their curriculum. The institution also runs a summer training program for teachers.
Of course, Carnegie's main mission remains the exploration of the frontiers of science. Its researchers are investigating numerous topics ranging from galactic evolution to the ability of worms to regenerate missing tissue.
Many projects include chemistry aspects. The Geophysical Lab's Hemley, for instance, is studying the effect of millions of atmospheres of pressure on material properties. "Ifou can turn insulators—in some cases gases—into metals," he says. 'And not only metals, but superconductors. Three years ago, we discovered superconductivity in elemental sulfur, and most recently we discovered it in elemen-
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tal boron." Hemley and his colleagues have been boosting the pressure high enough so they can convert hydrogen into a metallic state.
Hemley and his group conduct a variety of experiments at major national facilities, including synchrotron and neutron sources. They are leading a consortium that includes Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that is building dedicated beam lines at the Advanced Photon Source to provide X-rays as the light source for studies of fundamental physics and chemistry at very high pressures.
Bjorn O. Mysen, a GL experimental geo-chemist, is also exploring extremes of pressure and temperature. He's interested in the relationship between the properties and structure of amorphous materials such as silicates and aqueous solutions at temperatures topping 1,000 °C and pressures above several thousand atmospheres. These conditions prevail in the interior of Earth and similar planets.
MYSEN'S WORK reveals information about the melting of rocks and the interaction of those melts with other rocks and with aqueous fluids in such places. Surprisingly, he says, the extreme conditions make the structures of these fluids and melts indistinguishable from each other. "From the structural data on these materials," he adds, "we can deduce their physical and chemical properties in the interior of Earth. Those are the properties we need to describe how our planet was formed, how it evolved over time, and how it functions today"
GEs Hazen is "working on the idea that minerals in hydrothermal systems on early Earth might have provided a template for producing specific complex structures— prebiotic organic material—and also acted as catalysts for producing prebiotic material," Huntress explains. For example, different crystal surfaces of the common mineral calcite, calcium carbonate, selectively adsorb D and L amino acids —a process that might have contributed to biological homochirality
Organic geochemist George D. Cody is exploring whether "the fundamental biochemical cycles that biology uses for the basic functions of life, like metabolism, can be found abiologically" Huntress says. "Might there be precursor abiological chemical cycles that evolved into biological cycles and became fundamental to our metabolism?"
Fogel is studying ecosystems and ecology from the scale of microbes up to hu
mans. "I'm also interested in seeing how ecosystems functioned in the past back through geological time," she says. Her long-term goal is to use her understanding of Earth's ecosystems to try to determine whether other bodies such as Mars or Jupiter's moon, Europa, ever possessed an ecosystem.
DTM's Erik H. Hauri, an isotope geo-
HOME BASE Built in 1908-09 in Washington, D.C., the institution's headquarters building was designed by Carrere and Hastings, who also designed the New York Public Library and Washington's Cosmos Club.
RISKY BUSINESS Somervilletakes on "the crazy experiments that my students and postdocs can't do because they can't afford too many failures."
chemist, is studying the impact of water on the internal motion of planets. On Earth, the tectonic plates float on the mantle, drifting, colliding, and sinking. Compared with the other planets in the solar system, this mantle convection occurs fairly rapidly, Hauri says. That's because water has been drawn into the planet's interior by convection, softening the minerals in deep Earth.
Rocks from Earth, Mars, and the moon show that "Earth is uniquely wet," he says. That prompts the question of whether "Earth started with more water than the other planets or did it somehow 'ingest' water through later addition of meteorites or comets?" Hauri is attempting to learn the answer by using an ion microprobe and mass spectrometer to measure the relative abundance of isotopes in his rock samples. "The ratio of deuterium to hydrogen can tell you something about where the water came from," he says. Comets, for instance, have a much greater enrichment in deuterium content than do meteorites.
DTM Director Sean C. Solomon is running a mission for NASA in partnership with a variety of other institutions including Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory. The team is designing the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury The closest planet to the sun, Mercury poses "a severe thermal challenge to any spacecraft," Solomon says.
Mercury is awash in mysteries. The planet "has a bizarre composition, mostly metal," he says. 'And it has a bizarre atmosphere that contains species—sodium, potassium, calcium—not normally considered important constituents of planetary atmospheres. It has temperatures in excess of 700 Κ during the day, but it has deposits at the poles that look like water ice."
ΤΗ Ε CRAFT, which is due to launch in two years' time, will go into orbit around Mercury in 2009. It will collect data on the planet's topography and its magnetic and gravitational fields. It will obtain atmospheric information both by remote sensing and by in situ analysis of charged particles and will collect data on mineral composition of the surface using multispectral imaging and reflectance spectrometry
DTM's Nitder, who refers to himself as an "interstellar dust buster," is also interested in celestial matter, in particular in preso-lar grains in meteorites. These tiny dust particles condensed from gases given off by red giants and supernovas, then floated through the interstellar medium and served as the raw material for the solar system.
Nittler obtains samples of the grains by
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Andrew Carnegie's Largesse Alarmed Science Establishment
FOUNDER Andrew Carnegie's fortune launched the research incubator.
W hen Andrew Carnegie retired in 1901, he was reputed to be the richest man in the world. He is
a quintessential rags-to-riches icon. Born in a cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, he moved with his family in 1848 to what is now Pittsburgh. Carnegie started off working in a cotton factory and a telegraph office. He later shifted to the railroads, where he introduced the concept of sleeping cars, and ultimately moved into steel manufacturing, building a fortune in the process.
Carnegie shared his fortune generously, giving away more than $350 million by the time he died at the age of 83. In addition to providing funds to establish numerous libraries and other enterprises, he founded the Carnegie Institution in 1902 with an initial endowment of $10 million. His subsequent contributions to the institution totaled $12 million.
The original endowment represented an "unprecedented amount of money for pure research" in its era, says Robert M. Hazen, an experimental mineralogist in Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory. "This was much more money than even the government was putting into basic research at that point. The research establishment was scared that so much money was being poured in by Carnegie that the government would no longer support science, or that people would become complacent, or certain fields would grow too fast at the expense of other fields."
But Carnegie Institution's financial dominance has been eroded. Whereas many research institutes have "grown a great deal based on federal funding, we have not," says Carnegie President Maxine F. Singer. About two-thirds of the institution's operating budget is derived from its own endowment. The endowment is currently worth about $500 million and provides about $23 million for operating expenses. The nonprofit institution obtains the remainder of its funding from federal grants and philanthropic institutions.
"Carnegie's role in American science has evolved," Hazen says. "In 1902, it provided a significant fraction of the nation's research funding. A century later, we play a more modest role. Our present annual operating expenditure of about $35 million compares to a national R&D budget of more than $90 billion. So our impact now results from targeted, high-quality research."
dissolving meteorites in strong acids and examining the material that survives. He measures the grains' isotopic compositions, which can differ wildly from values typical of the solar system. For example, the relative abundance of 12C to 13C in the solar system is 89, give or take a few percent. But "if you look at silicon carbide grains in meteorites, that ratio ranges from about three up to several 10 thousands," he says. <<The only plausible explanation is that they reflect nuclear reactions going on inside stars" from outside the solar system.
Such data can reveal a lot about how stars and galaxies evolve. "We're learning that the stellar models that predict these sorts of things are more or less correct grossly," Nittler says, "but the details are wrong."
CONSIDERABLE chemistry-related research goes on in the Carnegie Observatories as well. One of the department's major interests concerns how the chemical elements were produced in stars over the history of the universe, Oemler says. iCWt went from a universe which consisted only of hydrogen and helium to a universe which had everything else in it. What we see around us today in the composition of the planets and stars and galaxies is the entire history of the production of all the elements over the history of the universe," he says. "The trick is figuring out that history from the cumulative product of the billions of years of evolution that we see today"
Beginning about 20 years ago and continuing into the present day, researchers in the department have been hunting down and studying the oldest stars—stars that were born before most of the chemical evolution occurred, Oemler says. Such systems can reveal what the universe was like very early on.
Oemler describes this project as a "long, hard slog." But the task will become easier when the Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle (MIKE) spectrograph for the new Magellan telescopes comes into operation. With MIKE, Carnegie astronomers will be able to simultaneously determine the chemical composition of hundreds of faint stars. The telescopes are being built in collaboration with four universities at the department's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Carnegie staff members involved in this project include George W Preston, Andrew McWilliam, Stephen A. Sheet-man, and Ian B. Thompson.
The embryology department's Andrew Z. Fire, along with Craig C. Mello, an assistant professor in the University of Massachusetts Medical School's cell biology de
partment, discovered "RNA interference" five years ago, Spradling says. W)rking with C. elegans, they found that segments of double-stranded RNAinjected into the worms could interact with endogenous RNA and block expression of specific genes. Spradling adds that this "revolutionary finding" enables scientists to genetically manipulate many organisms that previously had not been amenable to such handling.
Surprisingly, the worms can simply be fed£. colt containing the desired RNA sequences, or even fed the RNA itself. The diet "knocks out specifically the corre
sponding gene in the worm that eats it," Spradling says. "That allows you to screen the entire genome very easily by just putting the RNAs for every gene in different E. colt and feeding each type to a different group of worms."
Another project begun in the embryology department involved planarians, worms that can be cut into hundreds of pieces, each of which is capable of re-growing an entire worm. For years, scientists seeking to explain the mystery of the worms' remarkable regenerative capabilities have been stymied by a lack of success
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in manipulating their genes, as planarians reproduce asexually
But Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado—who left Carnegie in December to become an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine—and Phillip A. Newmark, who was Sanchez Alvarado's postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie, largely overcame this problem by using the RNA interference approach and have begun to identify the genes responsible for the planarians' powers of regeneration, Spradling notes. Several planarian homologs to genes that perform key roles during Drosophila and mammalian development have already been implicated in the regenerative processes displayed by planarians, he adds. Sanchez Alvarado and his colleagues have also opened up avenues for studying the stemlike cells called neoblasts that migrate to sites of damage, where they divide and repair or replace missing tissues.
In the plant biology department, re-
O n e can imagine designing a system for turning on genes in the cells by giving them a pulse of light instead of having to add some kind of chemical," he says.
WITH A SERIES of studies in global ecology, the plant biology department is extending its vision from the scale of the individual plant to the scale of the entire planet. Christopher B. Field and Joseph A. Berry have undertaken a number of projects to extract information about plants and ecosystems from satellite images. The researchers developed techniques for estimating plant growth from satellite images and use the results for applications ranging from impact of climate change to estimating agricultural productivity. They are also using data on local atmospheric composition—C02 concentration as well as the stable isotopes of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen—to provide a window on processes invisible to the satellites.
In NASA-funded work involving inves-
bility of sequestering carbon in forest ecosystems.
The ecology department will eventually include five or so faculty members and a total staff— including faculty postdocs, students, and technicians—of about 40. It will be housed adjacent to Carnegie's plant biology department on Stanford's campus. Construction of a 10,000-sq-ft research building and a 3,000-sq-ft greenhouse should be complete by 2003. The $5 million facility will showcase green design by maximizing energy efficiency, generating much of its own electricity with solar cells, and incorporating sustainable materials such as fly-ash concrete and recycled wood.
Half of the department's $2 million annual budget will be provided by federal and private grants obtained by the researchers. The other half will be derived from an initial $20 million endowment from the Carnegie Institution.
The new department and its endowment represent just one of five initiatives
SKY LIGHT Carnegie Observatories operates the Magellan telescopes (right) and du Pont and Swope telescopes (left) near Las Serena, Chile.
search is focused on molecular aspects of plant growth and development. Most of the projects exploit opportunities that have emerged from the complete sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome. "In many cases, it is now possible to progress from the identification of a novel mutant to the cloning of the corresponding gene in several months," Somerville says. "This has tremendously accelerated the analysis of many biological phenomena that were previously intractable."
For instance, Winslow R. Briggs studies the tropic response of plants to blue light. He and his collaborators determined that this process relies on a flavin-binding protein, which absorbs a quantum of light, possibly triggering a conformational change in the protein. That activates a kinase, which in turn activates a signal transduction cascade that causes the plant to bend.
Somerville suggests Briggs's findings could find an application in experimental tools. For instance, the light-activated apparatus could be transferred to animal cells.
tigators at several institutions, Field and Berry are now integrating this information with a climate model, exploring vegetation's influence on climate. They are also building models for what will happen to the biosphere as C 0 2 concentration increases.
Both Field and Berry are taking an active role in a new department that Carnegie is setting up to celebrate its centennial in 2002—a major development for an institute that last founded a department in 1914.
Field, who will head the new department of global ecology on an interim basis, says: "Our goal is to assemble a group of researchers who will explore basic questions about the structure and function of Earth's biosphere. Core scientific topics will include basic understanding of the major biogeochemical cycles, the distribution of plants and animals, the mechanisms controlling biological diversity, and feedbacks between climate and the biosphere." Field adds that the work will be relevant to such issues as the sus-tainability of agriculture and the feasi-
that will be supported by the Carnegie Campaign for Science, a four-year effort which began in December 2001 to raise $75 million from individuals, foundations, and corporations. Campaign funds will also go toward new instrumentation and scientific staff at the observatories, instrumentation and modernization of a building shared by DTM and GL, and a $4 million postdoctoral fellowship fund. In addition, the institution is constructing a new $30 million lab to replace the embryology department's current facility on the Johns Hopkins campus. Named in honor of Singer, who will be retiring at the end of 2002 after 14 years at the helm, the building will be completed by 2004. The department's current building will probably revert to the university at that time.
Singer should be able to leave the institution feeling confident that it will continue to be productive as it heads into its second century
"We're definitely not limited by our resources," Somerville says. "We're only limited by our imagination." •
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