Research > Of Science, Scientists and UCSF
It may come as a surprise that the first person to see living bacteria was not a "scientist" per se, but a 17th century draper from Delft named Antony von Leeuwenhoek. When this "self-taught Columbus of the littlest world" turned his crude blob of a magnifying glass on pond water instead of cloth, he entered an unimagined universe of microorganisms, cells and molecules that scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and around the world now examine freely and daringly. Was von Leeuwenhoek acting like a scientist? Of course. Did he use that term to describe himself? No. But it did not matter. In his day, there was a permeable boundary between keen observation and science and ample room for an amateur's persistence, originality and ingenuity.
Flash-forward three centuries, and one may ask whether the same attributes describe today's scientific enterprise. For scientists, the answer is an obvious and enthusiastic yes. For them, science continues to be a quest to know, governed by a methodical process of experiment. That is why scientists, particularly university scientists like those at UCSF, prefer to be called investigators. It defines how they feel about the type of work they have undertaken and the mysteries they will likely confront.
Those who are indifferent to science or who question its relevance might imagine for a moment a world in which everything was random, a muddled mess of unpredictable events and consequences with no pattern, no shape and no understanding. For all the uncertainty, horrors and surprises of modern life, we do not live in such a world. Our universe has rules, systems and limits that are far from random. Cells, for example, are born, grow and move in a particular way. Bodies and limbs -- from the wings of a fruit fly to the trunk of an elephant -- generate in a certain ordered sequence. Our fetal brains develop at the rate of 2,000 neurons per second. Why? And why this way and not that? Why then and not later? What is normal or abnormal? These are questions UCSF scientists like to ask, particularly if they are "basic" scientists, because the answers help to explain how life works at its most fundamental levels.
And without such answers, scientists cannot hope to outwit diseases such as cancer and AIDS, understand the complexities of learning and memory, or decipher the biology of addiction and aging, to name a mere thimbleful of worthy pursuits.
Some argue that this curiosity is often double-edged, that objective knowledge can be misused. History demonstrates that this is sometimes true. But while the curiosity that underlies scientific discovery is profoundly human, the direction of scientific inquiry is profoundly fluid -- particularly at universities where the freedom to explore allows the freedom to fail. And it is in this ever-changing context that a public institution such as UCSF, with its 1,300 principal investigators and 3,000 research projects, can focus its collective brainpower on problems, objectives and innovations with huge societal impact. That is the great promise of science at UCSF, San Francisco's oldest public university, a promise that will be furthered immeasurably by the new campus taking shape at Mission Bay over the next decade and a half and the research renaissance it will spark at the Parnassus Heights campus as a result.
Already there is great excitement about the "new science" that will stamp UCSF Mission Bay as something remarkable. Indeed, what is being discussed is not simply transplanting existing programs, but rather the creation of truly novel ones that will combine, for example, the new knowledge of genetics with advances in electronics and biotechnology to reveal further insights into how cells work. The same deep level of understanding about the brain is now possible, too, thanks to advances in neuroscience, genetics, cell and molecular biology, theory and computation, and in studies of human performance and brain activity, many of which have been carried out at UCSF. These can be merged with what has been deciphered about learning and memory, perception and decisionmaking to create research programs that reveal the hidden music of the brain's 15 billion nerve cells. This is to say nothing of the unprecedented advances in the understanding of human biology and disease made possible by the unraveling of the human genome.
Indeed it is not overconfidence that allows UCSF scientists to declare that they now know what to do, but an acknowledgment that over the last 20 years, they have explored the inner universe, mapped the most promising routes and are ready to begin a new journey of discovery. The ingenious and persistent spirit of von Leeuwenhoek is alive in this quest. So, too, is the need to serve the public good. And for those with even an ounce of curiosity about why things are the way they are, there is room, as well. For in the end, it is not the state of knowing as much as the state of seeking that makes science universal and that makes scientists of us all.
-- Jeff Miller
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