Genomics institute opens to bridge science community

Approaching the Carl C. Icahn Laboratory from Washington Road, one is met with a long, uniform facade of pale concrete. But, it is the view from within the building – in its massive, airy atrium – that characterizes its goals of inviting experts from various fields together to study the genome in an innovative new way.

The $50 million home of the new Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics was dedicated yesterday at a ceremony that featured President Tilghman and the principal donors behind the project, insurance executive Peter Lewis '55 and financier Carl Icahn '57. The dedication is a key achievement for Tilghman, the institute's founding director before becoming president in 2001.

Its mission

The reason for the building's unique and expensive design is its unusual mission — bringing together geneticists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians and computer scientists to understand how an organism's genome functions as a coherent system.

Stanford University professor and genetics pioneer David Botstein, the incoming director of the institute, said the input of many disciplines is necessary in a field that has now sequenced the entire human genome.

"It's [now] impossible to think about one gene at a time," he said in his new office yesterday, as workers installed a final light bulb above him.

Understanding how a series of genes becomes an organism is the ultimate goal, Botstein said. "There are too many parts and too many issues to do it by hand," he explained.

It will be necessary to focus on quantitative biology – an exact and predictable understanding of a biological system, he said.

Integrating research

The success of the institute will be in whether the diverse group of researchers can integrate their work and expertise to produce new innovations in our knowledge of life, he said.

One key to that integration will be teaching, both at the graduate and undergraduate level, Botstein said, which is why the institute will develop a genomics curriculum.

But the building itself was planned with interaction in mind. Renowned architect Rafael Viñoly, who designed Princeton University Stadium, created an interior environment that emphasizes light, long sightlines and common spaces, Botstein said.

Function and form

Viñoly said the building would bring people together. "It is a question of visual connection and placing circulation that forces interaction," he said yesterday.

"You almost can't not run into someone" in the Icahn Laboratory's many lounge areas and open corridors, he said.

The Icahn Laboratory is "L"-shaped, with one leg along Washington Road and the other across from the Lewis Thomas Laboratory at the southeast part of campus. The individual professors' laboratories are located on each axis, opening onto the atrium that fills the space between them.

A curved glass wall running between the tips of the L defines the atrium.

Thirty-one giant vertical louvers control sunlight entering from Poe Field. The louvers are computer controlled to follow the sun during the seasons. They are patterned to cast a shadow of a DNA-helix onto the atrium floor.

From within the atrium it is possible to see into the labs and offices on both floors of the buildings.

"You see everywhere else," he said, which is preferable to the dark corridor or cubicle of a typical genetics laboratory. It is that openness that will help the collaborative efforts of the researchers, he said.

Physics professor Bill Bialek, one of the several faculty members who have been appointed to the institute so far, said he came to Princeton because of the new interdisciplinary opportunities at the institute.

As a theoretical biophysicist, Bialek said he enjoys the interaction of researchers and theorists in the laboratory. "Things have been set up so that students and post-docs are clustered, but on the same corridor with people doing research," he said.

The atrium also features a small, self-contained auditorium, a café and an unusual, cavernous sculpture by Frank Gehry.

The only parts of the building still under construction are the basement classrooms, which will be done by next spring.

The institute was built with longterm research in mind and the full support of the administration, Botstein said. "If we are not successful, it will not be because we did not receive the support and resources we needed," he said.