February 2007 | Back to Table of Contents

Pulse

Biomedical Building Boom

The U of M says it needs new and more research space if it's going to remain a player in the biosciences.

Long and narrow, furnished with gray modular benches, and with industrial-strength electrical cords dangling from power strips in the ceiling, it’s not the sort of space that’s likely to make an interior designer’s eyes pop. But the linear equipment room on the fourth floor of the University of Minnesota’s year-and-a-half-old McGuire Translational Research Facility makes biomedical researchers swoon.

At least that’s what university officials are banking on as they pursue an ambitious
10-year plan to build or remodel 750,000 square feet of research space they say is essential to attracting and maintaining high-caliber talent. Over the next decade, officials hope to expand the U’s biomedical faculty by about 500 researchers and research assistants as part of a universitywide bid to become one of the world’s top-three public research universities.

Toward that end, last spring the university asked the Minnesota Legislature to create a biomedical facilities funding authority and give the university $330 million in bonding for construction of five new buildings. The Legislature responded with $40 million, enough to launch construction of the first of the new buildings; but it didn’t approve the request for the facilities authority. University officials are back at the Capitol this year hoping to make the authority a reality.

More than Fancy Digs
The university is short on biomedical research space for the faculty it already has, according to Deborah Powell, M.D., dean of the Medical School, who notes that the new, not-yet-built facility “was full before it left the drawing board.” Created to house the Center for Immunology and the new Institute for Translational Neuroscience, one of the many newly formed interdisciplinary research efforts at the university, the facility will be home to scientists such as Karen K. Hsiao Ashe, M.D., Ph.D., whose work on Alzheimer’s disease is internationally known. Powell says Ashe and her group will move from Diehl Hall when the new space is ready. Other scientists are already lined up to move into the square footage Ashe’s group will vacate. “It’s like trying to arrange the deck chairs,” Powell says of the plan.

Complicating the chair-rearranging is the fact that many of the buildings that house biomedical researchers are old. David Lee, who manages three of the newest research facilities at the university, points out that Diehl Hall, for example, which was dedicated in 1959 and currently houses dermatology professor and chair, Maria Hordinsky, M.D., kidney stone expert Manoj Monga, M.D., and the department of urologic surgery’s Kenneth Roberts, Ph.D., to name a few, has no emergency generator. Should there be a power failure, not only would air conditioning and ventilation systems shut down but also incubators, refrigerators, and freezers, and whatever was inside them would be lost.

The biggest challenge of renovating these buildings is not just rewiring or replumbing or installing generators, he explains. It is dealing with old-fashioned floor plans, where labs are individual rooms connected by long corridors. Such floor plans, he explains, don’t work today because they don’t foster collaboration among scientists, which has become an essential component of the scientific process and is often a condition of grants.

What’s needed nowadays, Lee says, are open labs, where benches can be moved and shelving reconfigured; small, closed support rooms for microscopy and tissue culture; and rooms where expensive instruments are shared and where researchers are almost forced to interact because of their proximity to one another. He compares the difference between working in the new- and old-style labs with the difference between living in a tight-knit condo community with shared common spaces versus a suburban neighborhood of detached single-family homes.

Funding Facilities and Finding Faculty
The main reason the university is asking for the funding authority, Powell says, is that administrators need the predictability of knowing that they have space to offer as they seek to attract and retain scientific superstars. At a press conference last spring, Richard Pfutzenreuter, the university’s vice president and its chief financial officer, said the Legislature’s traditional bonding process was simply too slow to keep pace with the needs. “It’s going to be 20 years before Minnesota gets this job done,” he said, if the university has to wait for the Legislature to dole out funding year by year.

Powell says the university is in direct competition with other states for faculty in the areas of cancer, the neurosciences, cardiovascular science, diabetes, and infectious disease, and that other states are investing heavily in new facilities and initiatives in these areas. Wisconsin, for example, is spending $750 million on building up its biosciences capabilities. “Those things attract our scientists,” she says, as well as the scientists the university is trying to recruit.

The university has attracted some, such as Gunda I. Georg, Ph.D., a top figure in the field of drug development, who brought 20 colleagues with her from the University of Kansas. But such gains add to the space challenges. “The problem in recruiting senior professors is that they want lots of space,” Powell says. “Getting a group of four or five neuroscientists means that you have to look at thousands of square feet of space and lots of money.”

University officials argue that Minnesota is in a race to not become a “fly-over state” with regard to biosciences and that the stakes of losing are high in terms of well-paying high-tech jobs. More than 21,000 people are currently employed in medical device and other bioscience industries in the state.

Powell says that the longer the state goes without a substantial investment in the university’s bioscience buildings, the more behind it will fall in the biosciences. “Our window is closing,” she says.

Facilities are essential if you’re going to compete, officials say again and again. But at the moment, they’ll have to tantalize candidates with a promise and a tour of the McGuire building.—Carmen Peota