UC Berkeley
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Previous conversations:September 2007 March 2007 Dec. 2006 Oct. 2005 May 2005 July 2004 Sept. 2002 - April
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Transcript
of Oct. 5, 2005 Bear
in Mind:
Research at UC Berkeley  Vice Chancellor for Research Beth Burnside |
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And so they wear out. And so they have to be replaced. And so they have to be replaced by an internal turnover mechanism within the cell. So what we study — what happens is that the new machinery for light detection gets made down in the base of the cell and it gets transported out to the rampart where light detection occurs. And so we study what is the mechanism for getting that transport to work.
Birgeneau: So that's fascinating. So does that mean that all of the cells that we're born with in our eye at birth survive our entire lives?
Burnside: They do, the same exact cells. And if they don't, you go blind. So that's what happens in retinitis pigmentosa: the photoreceptors, the turnover, some problem occurs in the photoreceptors and they're no longer able to maintain themselves, and then people lose their sight.
Birgeneau: So could stem cells possibly be a future therapy for that?
Burnside: There's a lot of research into whether that might be possible. There are stem cells in the retina, and there is some hope that maybe those stem cells can be tempted to differentiate into the right things. It's very complicated with the retina because it's got to get wired up to the brain in a way that conveys information in a useful way. But it has been possible to do chips that have been — that are light-detecting chips in people who've lost vision and people are able to start detecting light and dark, which is actually very helpful to somebody who's blind.
Birgeneau: We often hear about programmed cell death in parts of our body and in our brain in particular. Are there cells that actually get eliminated in the eye?
Burnside: Oh a lot. It's a very important part of the differentiation of the retina during development. A very large population of cells die.
Birgeneau: OK, but that happens during development?
Burnside: That happens during development and it shouldn't happen later. So once the retina is formed, there's a big investment in … evolutionarily in keeping those cells alive.
Birgeneau: Fascinating. Fortunately my own eyesight is surviving to date [laughs], but I may come running panicked to your lab saying, "Beth, help me."
Burnside: I wish I would be able to.
Birgeneau: So let's go on to the research agenda overall here at Berkeley, and again, I'd really be interested in hearing your comments on all of the research at Berkeley and what the challenges are that we have going forward.
Burnside: So of course research is at the heart of Berkeley's identity. I mean the research and teaching are completely interwoven, and the vitality of research is part of what is so attractive to students at Berkeley. And Berkeley is thriving. Our — last year our researchers — they're talented and they're aggressive and they're energetic and they are bringing in extramural support for research at an increasing clip. We had about $500 million in extramural funding last year.
Birgeneau: Really, that's great.
Burnside: $500 million. And about $300 million of that from the federal government, about $80 million from the state, about $20-$30 million actually from industry. So there's a lot going on. A challenge from that is that we're having this burgeoning research activity in a period when we're having financial crisis, and the overhead that we get from the sponsors doesn't really cover the costs of doing research. And so we're getting — we're feeling the pinch in these several years of budget cuts and trying to sustain the research support that's necessary to make it really thrive.
One thing that's happening in research that I think is really interesting for people to hear about is that research is becoming more and more multidisciplinary. And where the exciting kinds of things are happening are where people from fields that used to be relatively distinct — and they actually hardly even talk to each other, or even be able to understand each other because they talk in jargon — are now starting to collaborate on big problems that actually need the input of several different fields of research. And Berkeley has a terrific advantage in that arena because we have so many different areas at Berkeley that are very, very excellent. So we're uniquely situated to do multidisciplinary research. And it's really thriving.
Birgeneau: Universities are famous for being 'stove pipes' [unidirectional purveyors of information] and we do our education, for example, through departments, rather than through multidisciplinary centers. So how are you — how do you as vice chancellor for research overcome these traditional boundaries between disciplines? That's No. 1. And No. 2, how are we going to get all of this into the classroom? Because, as you said in your beginning comments, you know, research and teaching are very intimately related.
Burnside: They very much are. Well, the first answer is — my role is a complicated one. So I help try to tie things together in that regard. But in general, the deans are very supportive of multidisciplinary work. The multiple deans that have interest in a particular multidisciplinary enterprise are really remarkably collaborating to make things work.
In the teaching side, most of these, many of these units, like — one of the new initiatives is metropolitan studies, for example, to try to study the enormous kinds of problems that are associated with all the people in the world that are moving into cities now. And they draw on virtually the whole campus in different kinds of arenas. And they're actually performing undergraduate courses to try to teach people some breadth of the issues. And they're forming what are called "designated emphases" for graduate students, so that a graduate student majoring in engineering, and getting his Ph.D. in engineering, could also actually have a designated emphasis in say, computational biology, for example, or metropolitan studies, for example.
So an excellent example of trying to bring the stovepipes into collaboration to get multidisciplinary research to work is going on with QB3, because they're building a new building. QB3 is one of the California Institutes for Science and Innovation — QB3 actually originally stood for quantitative biotechnology, bioengineering, and bioinformatics. But nobody could ever remember that, so they started saying that QB3 must stand for quantitative biology on three campuses, because it's a teamed-up campus of UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and UC San Francisco.
Birgeneau: Oh, I thought the three was three disciplines, so actually we could play those any way.
Burnside: We can play it any way. But anyway, we gave up on the original title because nobody could every remember it. But QB3 is a quantitative biology kind of focus — the bringing together of people from physics, people from engineering, people from chemistry, and people from biology — to try to get people to apply all of these different approaches to individual questions that are really important in biology. And the strategy of the new building, which is the Stanley Hall replacement, is to mix, on each floor … This is a huge building. It's 150,000 square feet, it's got seven floors above the ground and three floors below the ground, and it's got many, many research labs: wet labs, it's got computational labs. And so the plan is to have on each floor a collection of people from all of these different areas that are working on a similar scientific question, from all these different areas. It's going to have physicists, it's going to have chemists, it's going to have biologists. And they're going to try to get along. [Laughs.]
We'll see. And hopefully that's going to really stimulate the interaction among these people, and it'll be an enormous incentive for the students to learn a lot about the other fields. So all the graduate students will be mixed together on the same floor from all these disparate fields.
Birgeneau: So the students involved — how do we make sure that the students don't turn out to be brilliant writers for Scientific American as journalists, without understanding any single one of these subfields well enough to be true experts and able to make deep contributions?
Burnside: Well, I think that is a very important challenge and that's a very important — I mean that is the risk of multidisciplinary areas where that is the focus. But what's happening in this case is that these students are still getting their degrees in the individual disciplines, their physics Ph.D.s, their engineering Ph.D.s, their chemistry Ph.D.s, but they're spending a lot of their research endeavor in this multidisciplinary area. So hopefully they'll learn a lot about other fields but they will nonetheless be trained in the rigor of their particular disciplines.
Birgeneau: So now, QB3 in the way you describe it in Stanley Hall has physical scientists, life scientists, and engineers. And of course here at Berkeley, we also have phenomenal strength in both the social sciences and in the humanities. I learned yesterday — I was up at the Townsend Center for Humanities and learned that they're starting a major thrust in stem cells.
Burnside: Yes. Yes, it's exciting.
Birgeneau: Which will be both research and education in stem cells. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the role in these kind of multidisciplinary activities of the social sciences and humanities.
Burnside: Actually, that's a very good example. The new initiative, the stem cell initiative, the proposal for training grant that we have already put forward in the response to the Prop. 71 initiative, includes quite a bit — there's an effort to do, to trace the history of the stem cell initiative by the Bancroft Library. They're going to do an oral history of it. There are ethics and social implications aspects of it, so a very strong part of our proposal includes the social sciences and the humanities. And there's quite a lot going on on this campus about stems cells and those areas. And another area where the social sciences are really an important part is in this metropolitan initiative, because that draws on a number of social science areas like economics and sociology and political science where it also includes the Center for Environmental — the College of Environmental Design and the College of Engineering. And so that's bringing together a lot of different efforts around a fairly central role for the social sciences and looking at metropolitan studies.
Birgeneau: Terrific. Great. This is so exciting. So I think I'm going to switch jobs.
Burnside: It is a fun job.
Birgeneau: So Beth, as you indicated earlier, we bring a lot of research money into Berkeley, but of course research agencies are just as stovepipe as our academic departments are. In my past life, I actually had a lot of experience with this and trying to get nuclear physics funding for projects that really fell in the domain of particle physics, and particle physics funding for projects that fell in the domain of nuclear physics. And those are two intimately related disciplines, and even that was difficult from the agencies because they each had separate budgets and firewalls between them. So how do we stay on the cutting edge with the initiatives you're talking about, which span such a broad range? I mean, does NIH [National Institutes of Health] for example, or the National Science Foundation or Department of Energy or Department of Defense, [do] any of those understand the need to change the paradigm and funding of research and if not, what do we do about it?
Burnside: Well, there is some recognition, I think, at the federal level to look for more interdisciplinary projects to support. It's very difficult to do, just like it's difficult for universities to pull that off. On the other hand, I think the real cutting-edge things, the things that are really way out there and breaking new ground — those things are generally not very adequately supported even in their own field by federal funding because it takes a while for that to get on the agenda of the federal funding agenda. So if Berkeley really is to stay at the absolute cutting edge — and we really have the faculty that can do that — we really need to provide some seed money. We need to provide state-of-the-art facilities so that they're not hampered by the facilities they have until they can get federal funding to do that. And we also need to give, not even large amounts, but small amounts of seed funding to let faculty explore really risky new things that are out there on the cutting edge that would be very hard to get funded for by the federal [government].And we've actually had quite a bit of success with donors providing resources for that and I think that's a very promising route for us to keep that vital.
Birgeneau: So you see that as — what should be a major part of our fundraising campaign to go forward.
Burnside: Absolutely, absolutely. To keep Berkeley really, really competitive, cutting edge.
Birgeneau: So that's great. So Beth, this has really been absolutely fascinating. I enjoyed it a lot. I hope you enjoyed it also.
Burnside: I did, I really did.
Birgeneau: And I look forward to our continuing interactions on keeping Berkeley on the absolute frontier of research — multidisciplinary, but of course, you know as I often say, we have to remember there's still going to be the lonely investigator sitting in her office, right, who's going to produce the breakthrough of the 21st century and we haven't even identified it, much less been able to talk about it.
Burnside: Right, exactly.
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 Randy Schekman, Eva Harris, and Robert Tjian. |
Introduction: Next, three faculty members from the health sciences sit down for a discussion about their own investigations and common interests: Randy Schekman is a professor of developmental biology and a campus leader in the fast-moving field of stem cell research. Assistant Professor of Public Health Eva Harris leads a unique effort to build scientific capacity in developing countries for the battle against infectious disease, and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular BiologyRobert Tjian is the faculty director of Berkeley's Health Sciences Initiative [HSI].
Birgeneau: Thanks Randy, Eva, and Bob for coming together. I know I and all of the viewers are going to be really excited to hear about your research and your thoughts on research here at Berkeley and the challenges that we face and also the opportunities. I want to thank Bob in particular since we're in his laboratory. I and probably everyone else would just like to hear a little bit about your research programs, you know, and the challenges that you face and the things you're proud of. So maybe we can just start with Randy.
Schekman: Well, thank you for having us here, Bob, and Bob. First of all let me say this is now the beginning of my 30th year here at Berkeley, 30 wonderful years I might add. During that time, the lab that I've had just next door, in the building next door, has engaged in work on the mechanism of cell growth — how cells put themselves together, how bits and pieces that make the surface of the cell are assembled and shipped out to make a cell enlarge in preparation for cell division. And this kind of process is tied to all kinds of disease states. One that we're particularly interested in, recently, is how this process is linked to the misbehavior, if you will, of proteins that are implicated in Alzheimer's disease. So I think if one understands how the normal process works and then how this misbehaves in particularly genetic forms of the disease, one will actually have a handle on the very first stages in the development of the pathology of the disease.
Birgeneau: How big is your research group? How many people are involved in this?
Schekman: So now the group is about 17 people. There are six graduate students, eight postdoctoral fellows, couple of undergraduates, technicians. It's supported largely by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And I'm very grateful for their generous support.
Birgeneau: As are we; good. Eva?
Harris: Let's see. Well, my association with Berkeley actually goes way back also, and I actually did my Ph.D. in this very department working on yeast, just like Randy does. But then at the same time I was also exploring another aspect that I find very important in science, which is essentially bringing the good of science to the rest of the world. And so I developed a program for essentially scientific-capacity building in less-developed countries.
And then I kind of brought those two together in my current research program, which is now in the division of infectious diseases in the School of Public Health. And what I do is I work on a pathogen of worldwide importance, which is called dengue virus. It's actually very closely related to West Nile virus, which I'm sure a lot of people have heard of here. And what I've done is to build on my initial training in molecular and cell biology to understand how the virus replicates within the cell. But I'm also interested in how this virus causes disease. Then I have a whole program which is actually looking in dengue endemic countries — a number of countries mostly in Central America, in Nicaragua, building on the work that I started a long time ago. And a lot of that is actually extremely exciting because having brought from really nothing — barely running water, chickens running everywhere, etc. — to pretty much world-class science both in clinical research and hospitals as well as in health centers. So it's been really wonderful to be able to look at and have my group come through on both the molecular and the pathogenesis, is what we call it. And then all the way out into the epidemiology and the community work.
Birgeneau: So this is a true example of what we call multidisciplinary research.
Harris: Yeah, and it's fantastic, and it is challenging because you pretty much have to be the best as you can in each section and find the people to collaborate with to really kind of be on top of the different disciplines which — I love it. I mean the learning curve is always like, you know, straight up: 90 degrees. And it's very exciting. And here I think it's a good place because there's a lot of people to collaborate with on the basic research.
Birgeneau: And so your students who are working on the fundamental molecular biology of the virus — do they tend to come through the molecular and cell biology unit or do they come through public health directly?
Harris: Well, we actually had a Ph.D. program in infectious diseases and immunity so, and I have graduate students from the microbial graduate group, microbiology graduate group for the most part — although I had some rotation students from MCB, from molecular and cell biology, as well. And now gradually I think some — that's started moving toward, looking at some of the basic mechanisms in human populations. Because now that I've build up the site in Nicaragua to the point where you can really start kind of exchanging, asking questions from the basic in the applied and then vice-versa. And that's kind of always been my dream.
Birgeneau: Terrific. Bob?
Tjian: Well, what you see around you is a typical molecular cell biology lab, and what I've been working on, almost as long as Randy — I'm not quite as old as Randy is …
Birgeneau: So how long have you been at Cal?
Tjian: 27.
Birgeneau: 27. So, three years?
Tjian: Yeah, a real youngster. And I was an undergraduate here, so I've been here a long time, but not as long as a faculty member. And what we do in this relatively typical MCB lab, which doesn't have a lot of fancy equipment, is to delve into the question of how genetic information that's stored in the now very famous molecule DNA, double stranded DNA, how that information is actually decoded or read by a very as it turns out complicated molecular machine, called a transcriptional machine that goes along, reads this DNA information, transcribes that information, and ultimately gives rise to all the molecules that make a cell be what it is. And initially, like the other two speakers here, you know, I was interested in the fundamental mechanisms of how this works — and it's a fascinating puzzle. But then as you learn more about the process, you begin to wonder "Well, how can I use this information in a more applied way?" And trying to understand is really getting at the roots of problems of diseases, rather than just treating the symptoms.
And so in '91 when our work reached a stage where I felt we could really sort of translate that into drug development, developing a whole new sort of technological platform for medical therapies. We started a company in South San Francisco called Tularik, to use molecular genetic information to develop new classes of drugs. And that experience, I think like Eva's, really taught me something very different about how to do science. Because the way science is done in a company — it has to be extremely coordinated. The biologists have to talk to the engineers that are growing things; the engineers have to talk to the chemists; the chemists have to talk to the imaging people. And then ultimately, everybody has to talk with the clinicians. So that experience, that firsthand experience of building the company through all those different stages really changed my whole view, possibly how we might do science and research at the university.
So that's when, as you know, I got involved with the Health Sciences Initiative, because I thought there's a better way and more efficient way of using information and translating that information, which was very basic and important but to a very practical level, in a fairly seamless way. And I think that that's what's exciting us, all three of us here, is [that a] world-class institution like Berkeley, which is well known for its basic research, can also have a huge impact, not only in medicine, but on the environment and on energy sources, whatever it is. But understanding fundamental molecular mechanisms. And that's what continues in this lab today.
Birgeneau: That's great. Just to give a sort of personal comment on that also, although it's not a university, basic-research lab, Bell Laboratory in many ways simulated what we are doing in the university. I was at Bell Laboratories doing research during the time that fiber optics were developed and spent a lot of time talking with different people involved. And no one of us could have imagined that the development of fiber optics at that time would have led to [New York Times columnist Thomas] Friedman's book, "The World is Flat." And there's a one-to-one connection, and so with profound changes actually in the global economy, produced by people who did basic research on how you conducted light in an efficient fashion. And so similarly in the health field, right, where we can be doing very basic research and it can be transformational in terms of the human condition.
I have two questions for you. One which is a purely scientific question coming from a physicist who's not a life scientist, which is that — one of the things that's a major surprise to people like myself in genetics is that you know, human beings have — it's turning out as few genes as even a plant like Arabidopsis right? And I'd like to think that we're further evolved than some simple plant, yet we have no more genes. And I remember talking to people at the beginning of the Human Genome Project who were anticipating 90,000 to 100,000 genes. And we end up with fewer than or on the same order as a plant. How can this be possible?
Tjian: Well this is actually a problem that I've inadvertently gotten into in a big way, because it turns out that if you look at a genome or all the DNA content of an organism, and you start to count the genes, which is the coding parts, the sort of informational parts that we can interpret, you're absolutely right; most organisms from the lowly little worm to humans, [have] somewhere between 25,000 and 20,000 genes. And yet anybody can look at a worm and look at a human being and realize the degree of complexity is astronomical in difference.
So how do you account for that? Well, it turns out, that of the 3 billion bits of genetic information we call base pairs on DNA that makes up a human being's chromosomes, we've really only interpreted about 3 to 5 percent. There's 95 percent that we used to call "junk DNA," which turns out to be the non-coding parts, but we now believe that that is the part that actually informs the coding part — when it's supposed to be decoded, how much. And in fact, very often diseases are mutations not in the coding part of the gene, but in the regulatory part of the gene. And so to me, that sort of plays right to where I'm mostly interested in, which is to understand how you turn on genes, on and off. And so I believe that part of the answer to your question is that the complexity of organisms is more correlated with what's going on in the non-coding informational part of the molecule than in the coding part. And that's the part that we're trying to dig out now. That's a major part of what goes on in this laboratory.
Birgeneau: So the characteristic of a human being is a species with sophisticated junk?
Tjian: Well, I would say more — another way to look at it is that our hardware may all be similar, but the software is very different.
Birgeneau: Eva, you were going to comment earlier.
Harris: Yeah, I was just going to say that it's interesting because in the virus that I'm studying — it's a tiny piece of nucleic acid — the fascinating part, one of the fascinating parts that we're looking at is precisely how it is that those non-coding regions regulate how the coding region is used to be able to cause disease.
Birgeneau: Let's talk about stem cells, which I know two and maybe all three of you are extraordinarily, actively interested in. Randy, maybe you can start. Tell us about Proposition 71 and the role that Berkeley is likely to play and why you're excited about it.
Schekman: Well, we're very excited about the opportunities in stem cell biology. In fact, some of us are marching with our feet. I had never worked on human cells before until this past year, but I'm very keen on getting into human embryonic stem cells for very specific basic and applied reasons. And Tjian, Eva — and I'm sure a lot people around campus — when Prop. 71 passed became excited and cooperating to create a center on campus. So we have now a group of about 30 investigators who have met fairly regularly to consider initiatives. We created, in the center, a curriculum, a brand-new curriculum of courses that will be designed around the theme of development, and in particular stem cell biology. We have a number of experts who have worked on aspects of developmental biology and model organisms. We have some faculty in the bioengineering department who worked on human adult stem cells, but we haven't yet started to work on human embryonic stem cells. But we're very eager to do so.
Birgeneau: Now as you know, among certain groups there's a lot of controversy, ethical controversies or religious controversies connected with using human embryonic stem cells, specifically. So why, in the work that you want to do, is it embryonic stem cells as opposed to other [types] that you think are necessary?
Schekman: So there are broadly two categories of stem cells that I worked on. There are adult stem cells, found in many but not all organs in our body. These adult stem cells can be harvested and examined in the laboratory; for instance, in the bone marrow there are stem cells that will give rise to the various cells in our blood. These stem cells have a very limited capacity to develop into certain cell types, pretty much strictly blood cell types. They can't develop into brain cells and vice versa. The cells, the adult stem cells found in the brain can't develop into blood cells, whereas embryonic stem cells, by definition, coming from the early embryo, have this plastic quality. They are capable of differentiating into any of the 200 different tissues in our body. So you can have these cells and learn how to propel them along a path into a brain cell, into a pancreatic cell, into a liver cell. You have the capacity in the laboratory then to study how these cells follow that path. And then to use that information to guide a basic understanding of disease processes that I think — and I think a lot of other people agree — can't readily be done with adult stem cells. So embryonic stem cells have this very unique potential niche in biology that is really a major emphasis now in modern developmental biology.
Tjian: Well, Randy and I both fall into the category of people that, probably without Prop. 71, we wouldn't be coordinating a big effort in embryonic stem cell research. But given that both of our previous basic research fits in with trying to understand how cellular functions work in general, so if I'm interested in diabetes, I want it to form a particular pancreatic cell type, but I'm starting with a pluripotent stem cell [a stem cell that can develop into any of the three major tissue types], how do I do that? It's a very easy transition for me to start thinking about using, particularly embryonic stem cells, because that's — the ability of an embryonic stem cell to become any cell of the hundreds of varieties is an amazing mystery. And we'd really like to understand how that's happening. And that's — it's really a basic problem in developmental biology.
Birgeneau: So this really is quite fundamental research?
Tjian: Absolutely, absolutely.
Birgeneau: Of course, the voters of California did not, I don't believe, authorize the expenditure of $3 billion in order to fund basic molecular biology, right? They really expect that out of this will come, will come remedies for particular diseases, horrible diseases.
Tjian: Let me speak to that. I think that's absolutely correct and I think putting an emphasis on the practical therapeutic aspects of stem cells is appropriate. But you can't get there without understanding the fundamentals of cell biology, so I think it would be naive and probably incorrect to think that we can bypass the basic understanding of stem cells, any more than we could have bypassed the basic understanding of cancer cells to try to solve cancer. So I think that it will require basic understanding, but at the same time, as I've already made clear, those of us working on it should be thinking about how to generate the right kinds of cells that will have potential regenerative therapeutic value.
Schekman: I think it's not just simply understanding the basic processes, but learning how to guide cells in the laboratory from an undifferentiated state to a specific differentiated state will be absolutely essential for this kind of therapy. So not only learning the rules, but being able to control it as we will have to do — is part and parcel of the therapy that is the promise of Prop. 71.
Birgeneau: Now Eva, you're the one of us who really has done translational research. This is not to say that you all haven't, it's been, you know, you're sort of gold standard, so to speak. So I'd be very interested in your comments on…
Harris: Well, I just think it's very interesting to hear, and having been part of the Health Sciences Initiative from the very beginning in terms of hearing how a lot of basic scientists are now really taking seriously the applied part. And for me, at first I thought, oh well, lip service, whatnot, and now I've been completely convinced that people are really taking it seriously now. There's always been this kind of conception here at the university — I call it "going up the hill" — where the harder, the more esoteric — you start with the public health at the bottom, and then you have biology and then your chemistry and then by the time you get up to physics and structural biology, you're at the top of the campus, you know, and it's always — there's been that concept of academia being pure, of applied science being more the dirty work or what have you.
And now I really feel there's acceptance of, actually, and recognition of, that it's really important to do that basic research, but then it's good and it's lauded to take it out. And that's something that I really feel is changing and like I said, initially I kind of — people would kind of drop me out to talk about my developing country work. But really I was being fully judged on my — how many NIH grants I have and my publications, and I just saw that right away. But for me, it was just too important to me — I had to do the other stuff because I just felt committed to that because of who I am. And now I felt that, I was really surprised that I felt, for instance, you know from interacting with people and from my recent tenure case, one that actually you know that the service and applying work is actually being more respected, I think.
Birgeneau: Now you're the role model.
Harris: Well, I don't know if I'd go so far as the way I need to live my life, you know, and there are certainly students who feel that but I never really expected anyone else to feel that way. And now I think we'll see. But I've actually heard from other sources in some of the committees I've been on here and — there's a President's Fellowship program at the UC Office of the President — that Berkeley has actually been at the forefront in kind of making service and other such work actually of value, as opposed to just "yeah yeah, you know, whatever, check it off."
So I think that's very, very important because this is — whether it's giving lectures to the community or whether it's actually going out and taking your time to create a program that benefits others outside the university — all that takes time. I mean true mentoring, good teaching, all that takes time, and usually you're being judged on your grants and your publications, so that's time away. And I think it's really important for universities to offer essentially some kind of reward system that allows people to take the time to do what we're here to do as an educating facility, you know which is to communicate to the community what we're doing, which is I think one of the reasons for this program. And to take seriously our mentoring and our international partnerships, and all that requires time to do it well. I'm really encouraged by seeing that that's starting to kind of work it's way up.
Birgeneau: No, I couldn't agree more. To introduce a slightly complicated subject, politically complicated, and it's connected to Tij's early comments, but also a lot of the penumbra of, around the stem cell initiative and the objections that are coming up. There is a significant number of people, unfortunately, in our community who are very suspicious of corporate interest in these fields and of drug companies specifically, right? At the same time I, of course, personally, as I've said many times publicly, you know, feel very important that in the funding of our very basic research we actually — it's actually an obligation of ours to translate it into the broader sector and for specifically for your kind of research, to address issues of human health, and of course drugs and drug companies are part of that. I'm interested in your comments.
Tjian: Well I guess I can start. I mean, I think even though the university and its methods for developing information that will be very useful for developing new therapeutics and attacking new diseases, the truth of the matter is that ultimately, to get that drug to the patient is going to require the drug industry to do it. Because the costs are way beyond anything a university can handle, nor do I think it's appropriate for the university to be doing clinical studies of tens of thousands of patients and paying $500 million to do that.
So there is no doubt that we have to be in a partnership with the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry. But I don't see that as a barrier because I think they fully understand, I mean the industry fully understands that this is a partnership. It always has been from the beginnings of the NIH until now. And I think Prop. 71 is just an extension of what the NIH has been doing for many, many decades. I think this issue of the general public being somewhat suspicious because the drug industry does — is very successful and so they make a lot of money, that those two are incompatible. I think that again, it requires education. We have to let people know that it really does cost, you know, half a billion dollars to develop a drug, and that those things are not going to happen within the confines of a university.
Harris: No, I was just going to say I haven't been involved in developing drugs, but one thing we did do was collaborate actually with engineers to develop a new platform, a chip-based platform for low-cost diagnosis, and I had a really interesting experience with the Office of Technology Licensing [OTL] here where the way that we had arranged this project was that it was fundamental to have essentially a development agreement which allowed essentially a royalty-free, or essentially at-cost production for the developing world — or what they call a nonprofit market — as well as an ability for the university to, if they wanted, to license it and make money in the developed world. And on its heels came a number of agreements where huge — from the Gates Foundation $40 million contract for making a malaria drug [usin] E. coli and this and that came right after, and right away sure, royalty-free license, and it was now a model. And I've talked with the head of OTL, who said, "Yeah, your project was the one that turned this around, and now 'socially responsible' licensing is a big deal." And again Berkeley is taking the lead, with actually a public good from the very beginning in mind, and a mechanism to have that happen. You know it's a kind of win-win situation. And so that's actually been a really positive outcome I think.
Schekman: I think Californians should look at Prop. 71 as a repetition of the example that we set 25 years ago, 30 years ago, with the birth of the biotechnology industry here in California, which was created because of an investment by government, state, and public and private institutions, and universities where basic science was done, and then that knowledge was exploited by the biotech industry then to create a new revolution, a new industry that has sustained the pharmaceutical industry since. I consider stem cells a kind of second wave, next generation of biotechnology. Already we see evidence of people moving to California to be here because the students, the postdoctoral fellows, the scientists who engage in this work will be trained here, and because it's such a lovely place, will want to stay here. One should take this with a very much more optimistic viewpoint
Birgeneau: I think all of us would agree that in a university, especially a university like Berkeley, our deepest value is academic freedom and freedom of speech. And there are many people that feel that when you partner with corporations that one way or another, you're going to compromise academic freedom. That graduate students are going to be restricted in their publications, that people may not be entirely objective in doing the research that they do, think it will have a commercial impact, or if they get funding from a company, especially a start-up company, that may in some way impact the actual research that they do. I personally think that one has to be vigilant but that, I think, that we can manage it in such a way as to protect academic freedom. But I'm interested in your views on this.
Schekman: Of course we should be vigilant and pay attention to the details of how things get worked out. Those of us who are at the university, who've grown up here, feel that our major mission is education and the publication of our research. And I for one, and I think those of us who are, for instance, involved in stem cell research would absolutely reject any arrangement that would preclude the publication of our work, the free publication of our work.
Tjian: I completely agree, and since of the three of us, I'm the one who's been the closest to the biotech industry for one. When I started Tularik, I made it very — you know, drew a line in the sand that said that I would not receive money from Tularik to do research in my own laboratory. In fact what went on in my laboratory had almost nothing to do with what went on in Tularik, even though the fundamental concepts arose from those. And that's really the model that I think NIH was all about, that you do the fundamental research and then you go do something completely different to apply to different diseases. I do think you do have to think about the potential conflicts because you are in many instances talking about significant amounts of compensation. But in the end, I think if you have people that are scrupulous and honorable about how they do things, it doesn't matter how many rules you set up, the bad ones will break the rules and the good ones, whether you have the rules or not, won't break the rules.
Harris: But I do think there are numerous cases where unfortunately, there have been issues with academic freedom and I think on our campus we have some examples as well. I think it's a very important point and like Randy was mentioning, you have to be very vigilant. I think those are very well-founded fears and can be viewed by the public unless proved otherwise. I mean I think it's incumbent upon us to do what Bob has done and do that very carefully with everyone. Because I do think those are well-founded fears because there are a number of cases and it's up to people in the university to do it scrupulously and make that clear. And it's very important to keep that up in the forefront.
Birgeneau: I must say my personal concern is mostly with students and students in the laboratories. I haven't been with Berkeley long enough to have been involved in any of the cases, but I know in places where I've worked at in the past, through the ombudsperson, there have been issues where graduate students have felt that they've been pressured to work on research which is relevant to a company that the professor has a connection with, as opposed to their own thesis. And then they end up using an ombudsperson avenue in order to present that complaint to the administration. I think that's one area where we have to be careful. And when research is explicitly sponsored by a company, we must have an agreement both for the intellectual property and also for publication that students can publish the work on a reasonable time scale and it won't [hurt] the advancement of their career.
On the other hand, my view is also — the flip side of academic freedom is that if a person wants to do research of a particular sort, and the only agent interested in sponsoring that research, they should have the right to do that research. And that for someone to say they can't do it because it's a company sponsor is actually — would be violating that investigator's academic freedom.
Harris: Yeah, I mean the question is, and I think this has come up here, when your results are not what the company wants to hear, I mean those need to be made public as they are. And I think that's where the other issue comes — it's not just a student issue, but it's on the — an investigator's issue.
Birgeneau: You're absolutely right. I agree completely. That comes up all the time everywhere, actually. Tij, you and I have actually probably interacted the most on the Health Sciences Initiative and so maybe you can just tell the viewers a little bit about it and progress that's being made.
Tjian: Well the Health Sciences Initiative was a concept that had its seeds probably close to 10 years ago through a number of faculty members on campus. What it's grown to become is very concrete in literal terms — two buildings, the Stanley [Hall] replacement building, which is now called QB3, which is now in its final stages of completion, and the second building, which we anticipate will break ground sometime in '06 or '07, to be completed, I'd say in another 10. And these two buildings, for my mind, the anchor points for a major movement on the campus which is an extension of something that was started in the '80s called the "reorganization of biology."
I would say that the Health Sciences Initiative or the health sciences program is really a coalescence of not only the biological sciences, but bringing in the chemists, the physicists, and the engineers because, as we were talking about before, people are really interested in developing their own technologies to help solve major biological problems whether it's cancer, stem cells, diabetes, or whatever. And so that's really the essence of the Health Sciences Initiative: how do we facilitate the flow of information, particularly among our students between the physical sciences — the engineers and chemists and computer scientists and physicists — with the geneticists and the molecular biologists and the School of Public Health people. And I think that Berkeley has always had a lot of collaboration, but the collaborations were very fragmented. I think what we're trying to do here is to coordinate that in a way, and have — the physical facilities are crucial to this, because a lot of the work we do requires very modern facilities which are changing constantly. And so there's both the building aspect of it, and perhaps more importantly, the programmatics or the intellectual, the virtual side of it. So that's really what the health sciences is for me. Maybe Randy can add to that.
Schekman: Well as Tij mentioned, it's now 25 years ago, Berkeley — at least in the life sciences — was very Balkanized. In fact, when I arrived as an assistant professor there were 16 different life-science departments just in the College of Letters and Sciences. You know, you didn't know who belonged to which department. And it was Dan Koshland, really kind of a founding father of modern life sciences at Berkeley, who led this revolution to reorganize life sciences and to create institutions that permit communication — more effective communication between what used to be Balkanized departments. We now have a rule, for instance, that came from that reorganization that every new search, every faculty search, must be interdisciplinary. That is, every search will have faculty members sitting on a committee from different departments. So we've created in a way, a kind of virtual college of biology, rather than having separate departments. I think this is actually a lasting legacy of the life sciences at Berkeley that I don't see at too many other institutions. I think it's quite a unique feature that contributes to our greater sense of collegiality here.
Birgeneau: Let's talk more broadly about Berkeley and why we're all here. I know in my case, although I've only been here for a year, I came here because the opportunity to lead probably the institution that I'd always admired the most as a great public teaching and research university came up, and I thought, "I can't let this go by." You all have had almost your entire careers here, right? And so what is it about Berkeley that holds you to the institution?
Tjian: Well, I can start. I was an undergraduate here, and that was an extraordinary experience — not an easy one, because it's very competitive and you get thrown in with some brilliant kids. If you came from a reasonable high school, you thought you were the valedictorian and you came here and realize that you were a real dummy compared to the rest of the students. And so I had that experience many times, but it really builds character and allows you to find out what you really are good at. I went off to Harvard and Oxford to do my graduate degrees, but I always really wanted to come back. I think what fascinated me was the quality of the students, my colleagues that I met when I was here. And I thought that any place that has students of that quality, it's just got to be a rich ground to do research.
Then I learned another aspect that I couldn't appreciate when I was a student. And that is the way that we teach class. That the fact that we have our best faculty teach the lower-division courses and really get the students at the youngest stage to get excited about different fields, which is kind of the opposite of a lot of other institutions where the big shots really don't ever see the freshmen. Here it's quite the opposite. And I had the opportunity and the privilege of teaching Bio 1A, which was a real eye opener. And so I kind of think that there's a real — you either have to love the fact that you're teaching 500 students who, many of them who are coming from middle-class to underprivileged families, but who happen to have wonderful brains and some of them are absolutely brilliant. And to give them the opportunity to achieve the sort of level of intellectual and academic excellence. That is what really excites me aside from all the good science that goes on.
Birgeneau: Eva?
Harris: I think for me, what's been a draw has been the ability to collaborate across disciplines. And I have really wonderful collaborations with engineering, with immunologists, with structural biologists, with statisticians, and you can really create the path. And for me the path has been really important to bring values into science and to kind of teach excellence in science and excellence in global citizenry.
I think that science is a very international by its trade. We go to conferences, we collaborate with people, and it's a very positive building kind of international connection instead of a destructive one. And I think in this day and age, that's very important. And I think that's something which we excel in here, partly because there's so many both local and international collaborations, but also because of its particular history. And in general, there's a place for believing that values are important and that we should bring those into our daily life, you know, and in our science. And that for me is important here.
Birgeneau: I guess I would have added to what you said, which I agree with completely, is that also we have the very fortunate feature here at Berkeley that virtually all of our departments play a leading role. So when you establish collaborations with someone in engineering, for example, not only is it a collaboration with an engineer, it's likely to be a person who's playing a world leadership role in their field. So that just means that one can simply do better research. Randy?
Schekman: Well, in addition to the obvious excellence of the place, what is most important to me and why I've spent my entire career here is that it's a public institution. And that has a lot of deep meaning for me because I came from a very middle-class family with five kids, no prospect of going to any fancy private university — might have been able to get in, but we couldn't afford it. I went to UCLA; it was the best local public institution available to me. And it opened my eyes to the possibility of an academic career.
So I feel very strongly, though we've all had offers, sometimes even more lucrative offers to move to fancy institutions, I've easily turned them down because I've felt that being in a place like Harvard, it just doesn't do the same as what one can do here. I mean, as an example, you cite this all the time; I do as well. The demographics are very different. At Harvard, Larry Summers was able to offer a free ride to all the kids that came from families with a net income of less than $40,000 a year. Well, guess what? They're only 6 percent of the freshman at Harvard that come from that demographic. That group comprises a much larger fraction of the students here. So I feel that what we do is absolutely irreplaceable and cannot be sustained by all the Ivy League schools put together.
Birgeneau: That's terrific. I'm sure we could go on for hours. This has been fascinating. And I just want to thank each of you for a very enjoyable conversation.
Segment three: The energy market, smart buildings, and putting technology in California homes
Introduction: Next, Paul Wright, professor of mechanical engineering and associate dean at the College of Engineering, Edward Arens, professor of architecture and director of the Center for the Built Environment, and graduate student Will Watts discuss their pursuit of energy-saving technologies and the cross-campus benefits of CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.
Birgeneau: So Paul, the last time I saw you, you were together with the governor —
Wright: Oh yeah, that's right. Arnold.
Birgeneau: Right. And you were explaining to him what your research is and why it's so exciting, and I know the governor was really impressed.
Wright: Yeah, I think he even understood it.
Birgeneau: I'm sure the audience will be impressed as well, so why don't you repeat for us what you said to the governor.
 Will Watts, Ed Arens, Paul Wright, and Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. |
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Birgeneau: Not that making money is such a bad thing.
Wright: Not such a bad thing. And in fact that money is now funding some of the work we're doing. So, but we really wanted to do as a public university and with our wonderful students and with our alumni base, we really felt that we could do something different in the world by creating this CITRIS activity. And as our alumni out there and everyone knows, one of the worst times for energy was in 2000 and 2001, where we had these really difficult times with brownouts and blackouts, and I think everyone can remember that.
This graph that I actually wanted to show you is maybe the best way of framing our discussions today. What this graph does is plot the peak load in California on a daily basis against the months and the year. So, sure enough, in a state like California, we're pretty easy on energy during the winter months. It's a pretty easygoing state; the temperatures aren't very high or low. We don't use much electricity. But the "gotcha" comes on days like we're experiencing today, where temperatures in the Central Valley will go to at least 100 degrees. And, sad but true, we all crank up our air conditioning and that causes a huge, huge peak. We can see from this graph that the red line shows the amount of commercial air conditioning that's used, and the green line shows the amount of residential air conditioning that's used. And you can see the peak loads jump from about 30 gigawatts a day to almost 50 gigawatts a day.
So what happens during those times is that we really have a crunch. Every power generation unit in the state is panting. Worse than that, they have to crank up some really old facilities, which then are pollution oriented and make the situation even worse. This is my cocktail-party explanation, right — is that we're all used to the idea that — you know we all use our cell phones when we're a student on the evenings and weekends because it's cheaper. So this is all about spreading the loads. And what's gonna happen, as we'll explain — we're building technologies where PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric], via the California Energy Commission can send a signal to your house and to my house and to everybody's house, say on these really hot, intense afternoons, like 4 o'clock in August, September, and October saying "Hey! Electricity is very much in demand right now. We're going to make it a little bit more expensive, and what are you going to do about it?"
And one of the most obvious things that we'll see, some of them work with Will, for example, one of our students has been describing — there might be some traffic lights, some mini-mini-traffic lights on your washing machine. So that when your kid comes in from soccer, puts his dirty clothes in the washing machine, he can see the red light glowing and know that this is not a great time to do the washing because it's very expensive. If you owned a pool or if you owned things like that, you wouldn't do the cleaning of the pool at that time. CITRIS technology will help install this new technology so that PG&E can send those rates. So that's the basic kind of scenario. Does that —
Birgeneau: That's fine. That's terrific. So —
Wright: I'm going to put this down now, so I'm not waving it around.
Birgeneau: Maybe Ed will tell us how much of this is new software and new systems, and how much is actually new technology which you all needed to invent.
Arens: Well, lots of pieces are new — the hardware and the software. This is really an opportunity that hasn't come into the building field since the '70s. At that time there was a real explosion in our ability to kind of predict how a building will perform. We now have this ability to sense and measure stuff with wireless sensors. This is what the project uses as its fundamental technology. And with that we are going to be able to observe how a building's performing and tune its performance in a really sophisticated way so that it saves energy and doesn't imperil the comfort of the people in the building.
This type of thing, it seems like this is a period that's a breakthrough opportunity, a kind of thing that just comes along every few decades. And in the building field this is a big one, and I think we were right onto it. The technology is just getting there. The operating system for running mesh networks — that's just a technology for the sensors that we're going to be using — is just out and is being debugged. And we're trying to develop ways of building so we'll use those things. The impact of this thing, I want to emphasize, is really important. Buildings use 40 percent of the energy in the country or in the state —
Wright: Yeah, yeah, that's a huge number.
Arens: There's no segment of the energy sector that's larger than the building is. And electricity — two-thirds of electricity, 70 percent, actually, is used in buildings. And the opportunities for saving, they are actually very large. They're not optimized.
Birgeneau: Even in cold climates, the air conditioning bill exceeds the heating bill. Although the recent rise in oil prices — that may change. Air conditioning is phenomenally expensive nationwide.
Arens:. The technology that we're developing here will work in California, it'll be good for California, but it's going to be something you can sell in the country, the rest of the country, and to the world.
Birgeneau: So Will, you're a student involved in this project. I understand you got involved as an undergraduate —
Watts: Right, I was actually doing my undergraduate [degree] in physics here at Berkeley and I got more and more drawn into the energy efficiency and renewable energy going on in engineering. I was really drawn to [Wright's] lab because of the building science and how these wireless sensors can be applied to energy efficiency and reducing energy usage. That's what really drew me to this lab, so I applied to graduate school in mechanical engineering.
Birgeneau: So you're now you're just an entering graduate.
Watts: I'm an entering graduate student.
Birgeneau: So you have picked up a few new academic skills. I'm sure you already have all the laboratory skills.
Watts: I have the laboratory and I feel that physics really gives me good debugging skills, just sort of decomposing engineering problems that are sophisticated — I can sort of just to go into that and so I've been teaching myself coding, this operating system and sort of designing circuits and doing that level — interacting with architects, and as they propose the technology, coding it and designing the hardware to fit on to the wireless beacons that we have. So, exactly.
Birgeneau: At one stage of my life I was head of a physics department; you're my model. If you major in physics, you can then go on and do anything and you're proving that.
Watts: I believe it. I believe with the electronics class, the lab that we had here at Berkeley and including all the physics classes sort of gave me a method of thinking that makes me confident in approaching engineering problems. I think it also proves the CITRIS point, than an interdisciplinary department or institution really brings in a lot of talent to the foreground for a university.
Birgeneau: So, I'm getting impatient to see the actual devices. I'm an experimental physicist; I like tactile things.
Wright: Let's start off by — let's start off with this little unit here. So it nicely summarizes, even though it's in prototype form, what your new thermostat, and in fact all of our new thermostats, would be like. Normally with a thermostat, you have some kind of setting that would give you a comfortable temperature, say, of about 72 degrees, let's say. But on this one, we have a wireless unit in here, and so PG&E will send signals to this and when the electricity becomes very expensive, effectively, you might want to have a cost setting here which will either be in terms of comfort or in terms of cheap, in terms of cheapness.
Each family will set up their thermostats according to some different setting. So when those price signals come in, this thermostat will learn about your family and make an adjustment according to how much electricity you want to pay. And we make the joke that if you're a somewhat impoverished graduate student, you're probably going to have your comfort level — you're going to have to say, "Well, you know it's getting very expensive now, so I've going to be a little uncomfortable." Also throughout the house, there will be these small sensors (picks up sensor) that are, say, Velcroed to the wall. They're very, very inexpensive, we can power them with our batteries — that's another part of research work. And these will communicate with the thermostat in terms of what the temperature is in different rooms and whether there are people in those rooms, so you would again, adjust the thermostat according to whether people are say in the bedroom or whether they're sitting watching TV.
Birgeneau: Wouldn't it pay to have a detector and a controller in every single room?
Wright: Yes, except that we only have, most houses only have one air conditioning system down in the basement, right. And so there tends to be one central cooling environment and you want to try and adjust things based on that. You're absolutely right. When we get into slightly larger houses, then we can have controllable — what's called controllable dampers or controllable registers. Then you get the best situation. But for us in our single air conditioning unit, then it pays to try and adjust it according to that one unit and where people are.
Birgeneau: I could imagine in large buildings, 57-story buildings, I mean this could save an incredible —
Wright: This will make a huge difference A final little thing I should say before I pass this over to Will perhaps to describe it in more detail, since he built this device during his undergraduate work and now his graduate work, is that this will finally communicate with your meter and then the meter will send those costs back to PG&E.
So there's sort of three essential elements in this California Energy Commission project. It's a new thermostat, new temperature sensors, and then the new meter that we don't have today.
Watts: What we are working towards — this is sort of proof of concept, getting sensor data, and actuating the house. But what we're moving towards is what a lot of Ed's work is: a smart controller unit that learns the occupants.
Birgeneau: So is this like a neural network?
Arens: Yeah, it'll learn both the thermal performance of the house, how fast it responds to change and the air conditioner input, and also how the people interact with the device, with the interface here. So if they keep calling for more, or at certain times or whatever, it'll learn that and realize that maybe it ought to set up the set point that's underlying the thermostat. And that's —
Watts: — ideally, something you could buy from Home Depot and plug into your home and not worry about batteries too much and it would learn occupant behavior for a maximum efficiency.
Birgeneau: So this is all different from physics — mechanical engineering, obviously, from electrical engineering, from computer science. It sounds like some neuroscience with neural networks.
Arens: Well, there's certainly some psychology, uses psychology and there is a laboratory that CITRIS funded called X-lab. It's in the [Haas] School of Business and there you're able to set up a bunch of experiments where you have subjects come in from off the street — they have all these ways of hiring these subjects and they will interact with the interfaces that we think we're going to propose, and we see how well they can do.
Watts: That is one consideration in the coding of these is how the network forms itself. Sort of the idea of mesh networking is that these wireless beacons are able to connect in the most efficient manner. So in the neural networks that's happening on the software, sort of how information is transferred electronically, via the electromagnetic waves. It's sort of — that's one way that — I'm hoping to get more into that as I design the system.
Birgeneau: This is also an actually interesting challenge from the point of human interface. So more than 50 percent of people in households can't operate a DVD player, but at the same time, most people need their house air conditioned and we want to air condition in this way. It seems to me you have a really important challenge that you've already begun to address: how you're going to design this system so that people with a wide range of technical abilities can use it, starting at 0 and going all the way up to people who are going to want to reprogram it.
Arens: We hear that 80 percent of current thermostats are either in the default initial setting or they're in hold mode, which is where you've over ridden it and you're running the thing by just the up and down button. So that's a relatively simple problem compared to this variable price scheme that we're going to deal with.
Birgeneau: Now, often one of the biggest challenges in this kind of really forefront university research and technological development is going from the laboratory to real people's houses, the transition to the marketplace. So can you talk a little bit about your strategy for that?
Arens: Yeah, we do have the system set up in the house now. We have, I think, 30 sensors that we've gotten that work. Every step has been new — the number of sensors, the way it works in the house. So we will describe this. We'll write papers about how this house worked and how the networks performed, electronically, how the house performed thermally and how much energy was used and also how the occupants interacted with it. There's plenty of stuff to show. From that, the various industries, companies that make building controls — they'll be looking at that.
That's one way. We have a fair bit of industry connection with our Center for the Built Environment, which is over in Wurster Hall. And we have manufacturers of building equipment, we have design: architecture and engineers and designers. There's a big group that belong to this center. And we feed this stuff to them as soon as it's done, in fact, every six months.
Wright: Another aspect which is very nice that is a companion to that is our colleagues at the California Energy Commission. We work with them every six months to have a large description of our project, usually at a Berkeley hotel. And rather similarly these companies — you know, Honeywell, Johnson Controls — they come into see the research. Also colleagues from PG&E come in, and more recently PG&E did put out some new requests for these new wireless-style meters. So it's been a little bit inspired by our research.
So that element of the work is being rolled out locally. We should also say that looking at the basic sensors like the one here and the one that Will was holding a little while ago — these are being fabricated now by three or four companies in the local area, all four of which are spin-offs from Berkeley research. And there are 11 million homes in the state, and our goal, our dream, is to make these systems that we've just described rolled out to all 11 million homes in the state. Again, I think underscoring the role of a big public university like Berkeley to do something that has a real statewide impact on a critical resource like energy and really make a difference to the state and global warming issues and the investment in energy.
Birgeneau: You're also going to create a lot of jobs.
Wright: Create a lot of jobs, yes.
Birgeneau: High-end jobs that are going to employ California, boost the economy, get us out of our deficit. Provide more funding for our universities.
Wright: And of course we need that to get us through this period, we definitely need the support of the state and the UC discovery grants and obviously the university, UCOP system as possible. Because CITRIS is a wonderful project but it doesn't have as much base funding as we would like to get — and you're more familiar, Bob, than most people, where you get a large grant and it lasts, say for two years, and then with bated breath get through to the next renewal right, and you just don't know about the rollercoaster of these kinds of grants.
Arens: Meanwhile, the students are going through a longer time scale and you have to keep them going.
Wright: I mean, Will's going to join us. He could be here for five years, and who knows what's going to happen two years from now when this new grant ends.
Birgeneau: We're, of course, very optimistic. So first of all, as you know, the UCOP, the Regents recently approved a new building, so we're really excited about that. We have almost all the funding put together. For the next couple of years, we have some core funding for CITRIS. We really hope that will segue into a proper base budget. I couldn't agree more. In fact, generally it's a challenge for universities, which indeed I've had personal, firsthand — when the shock hits you that you've spent the money to create something wonderful and new and something you need an operating budget. That often presents more of a challenge than starting the company in the first place. But of course in the end, what we do is teaching and research. So that kind of funding is really critical to us. And you know, fortunately, I think the government, but also people in the community, our donors, are coming to understand that better and better.
Wright: That is true.
Arens: I'd like to comment on the buildings thing because our buildings kind of actually are research labs for people like me, because we like to get into buildings that are embodying the new technologies. We really, I think have an opportunity to use the Berkeley campus and maybe the UC system as a way of showcasing the latest building design. And I think this is really something we need to encourage because I think donors out there would like to see, or would respond to our request to say, "Let's put up one of the greenest buildings possible." It may cost more, especially since there'll be all sorts of new things in it. But maybe it's also worth it because we can use it as a way of demonstrating what we do. This is true not only at Berkeley, this is true for the rest of UC.
Birgeneau: We like to think we're leaders here at Berkeley and innovators, right, so we should be leading and innovating even in our buildings. So let's come back to Will. So you're just starting — are you doing a master's degree first?
Watts: I uh, I'm doing sort of an M.A.-Ph.D. program, and so it's sort of running together where as I'm doing my master's, I prepare for my Ph.D.
Birgeneau: What are your long-term ambitions?
Watts: My long-term ambition is, sort of speaking of high-end jobs I really feel, I feel enthusiastic about bringing these technologies to market: energy efficiency and renewable energy in market. I think that's a next key step in the next 15 years that I feel a lot of graduate students should engage in. Especially since, you know, I feel like there's this wave forming and I want to be part of bringing it —
Birgeneau: You want to be on the leading edge.
Watts: I want to be on the leading edge of the wave of bringing in energy efficiency technologies to market with my high-tech degree. So that's — I'm really excited that I have the opportunity to be in a lab that's actually working on that. That I'm engaging in that.
Birgeneau: Great thing is that you were able to participate in this as an undergraduate.
Watts: I mean it's great continuity that I was here for almost two years as an undergraduate and then now here as a graduate student. It's just nice to have that continuity of research.
Birgeneau: So yesterday it happened late afternoon on Memorial Glade that we welcomed — there were about 3,000 out of our 6,000 incoming undergraduate students here at Berkeley. One of the things that I said to these kids is, "What I really like about Berkeley is that Berkeley is a place where things happen. " I often say that other universities hire Nobel Prize winners. We grow them. And so I told the kids that while you're in class, you know Ed or Paul may be standing at the front of the class and teaching you sort of elementary mechanics or elementary circuit design, but simultaneously doing forefront research on something that's really exciting, and that students should find out what a professor is doing and if it excites you, talk to them after class and you know, they'll find a place for you in their laboratory.
Wright: That's definitely true. One could use that corny old metaphor that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We really like the students to stop us in the street, stop us in the corridor, because we recognize that it's a big student body and it's really up to the students to take initiative and talk to us. But I think — one thing I also wanted to mention about the wonderful aspects of Berkeley — this lab that we're sitting in is funded by Ford Motor Company. And so people often say to me, "Well why is Ford, a Midwestern company interested in funding this wonderful facility?” And quite genuinely they said to us in 1999, when they set this up, that they recognize themselves as being more of a global company. With due respect to the University of Michigan, they couldn't keep hiring their graduates from the University of Michigan and they wanted to have a more diverse and globally aware student body for their car design and for their marketing.
Birgeneau: I think we have students from 40 states and 37 countries. And also, I think it's remarkable, which for the UC system, which Berkeley is a paradigm, is that one-third of our students come from families whose family income is under $35,000 a year. These kids are driven and Berkeley is their halfway [point] into mainstream America. They're going to end up leading America. One of the other aspects of Berkeley, which I know impacts CITRIS, is not only do we have this incredible combination of economic and ethnic diversity in our undergraduate student body, we have similar phenomenal range in the number of disciplines that we have here at Berkeley. So Berkeley is really unusual in the combination of —
Wright: It is. And you know, I think, that's what makes CITRIS such a great sort of umbrella for those many, many departments, and as we know, four different campuses. And this project, I mean it's been a great, great pleasure to get to know Ed over the length of this project and to really learn from him. And we have colleagues from the Berkeley Research Center working with us, colleagues from the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, we have colleagues — two or three colleagues from mechanical engineering and then finally through the Haas School of Business, there's XLab — this is where we can get the human-factors aspect into the project.
Wright: So this is a very diverse project, and CITRIS itself represents an opportunity for those diverse bodies to come together. You're absolutely right. It's a phenomenal place to be to attack these big social problems.
Birgeneau: So terrific. This is really fascinating and I just want to thank you for coming. [To Watts] Good luck in your graduate career here. I know you will just do terrifically.
Wright: This is an exciting time.
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