Steven G. Clarke, MBI Director

The MBI continues to play a catalytic role as UCLA investigators strive to understand life at the level of the interaction of individual molecules - to see the beauty of evolution in constructing complex systems from simple parts - and to see and understand what goes wrong in disease and aging. We have never been so close to seeing the inner workings of organisms and to be able to manipulate them for our own uses!

The philosophical core of our mission can be summarized as the three "I.D.s".

The first "I.D." is interdepartmental - our 164 members and associates come from 21 different departments in the College of Letters and Sciences, the School of Medicine, and the School of Dentistry. We are a large part of the glue that cements together the biomedical fabric of UCLA. We bring together faculty in shared space, in seminar programs and retreats. We also create new teaching opportunities for undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows - the pipeline for future faculty and leaders of industry.

The second "I.D." is interdisciplinary - molecular biology represents a central focus of not only chemistry, biology, and medicine, but physics and mathematics. A large part of biomedical discovery today is putting together facts in different areas and applying technologies in different areas to come up with new solutions. Today, we see the increasing importance of the physical sciences (and engineering) in molecular biology, particularly in the areas of genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics.

The final "I.D." and perhaps the most important one is independence. The Institute is in a position to bring together researchers and programs where the agenda is set by campus-wide and scientific needs. We can be the brokers for change, looking out for the needs of the UCLA community as a whole.

How is this philosophy being put into practice? We have divided the work of the institute into two main areas.

The first area includes the education programs (see ACCESS Program and Molecular Biology Ph.D. Program) representing activities that occur in much of the first floor space of Boyer Hall. This educational mission is certainly aided by the campus geography. Boyer Hall could not be more centrally sited between physics, mathematics and chemistry to the north, engineering to the west, chemistry and microbiology to the east, and life sciences and medicine to the south. As the construction of the Seismic II building housing many of our members in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, Biological Chemistry, and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology goes up just to the south of Boyer Hall, and the new building for the California NanoSystems Institute goes up just across the courtyard, we will have an even better opportunity to connect with both our old colleagues on the biomedical side as well as potentially new colleagues on the engineering, mathematics, and physics side. The geographically–central location of the MBI and Boyer Hall could not make it a more ideal site for interdepartmental and interdisciplinary roles.

The second area is equally important. We want the institute to promote cutting edge research in response to campus-wide needs. A significant part of this work involves our efforts to leverage and creatively utilize laboratory space in Boyer Hall. At present, this has allowed us to focus a mission in the broad area of genomics, proteomics and chemical biology. We want to insure that we help bring to UCLA faculty at the frontiers of the new technologies in these areas, including chip methodologies, mass spectrometry, robotics, and imaging. In proteomics the pace of discovery is rapid - we want to insure that UCLA remains a player in this arena - the creation and maintenance of state of the art core instrumentation facilities is a priority, along with recruiting new faculty that will push these technologies to their limits. A new area many of us are very excited about is metabolomics - understanding first the cast of characters of the small molecules in the cell that make us work - neurotransmitters, modulators, etc., and how enzymes alter their levels in health and disease. Here we want to couple the identification of new proteins with the identification of new small molecules. A major part of this mission lies in our partnership with the UCLA Institute for Genomics and Proteomics that is directed by one of our members, David Eisenberg. This center is located within MBI space in Boyer Hall, and represents a leading edge in our emphasis on the general area of chemical biology.