o SGF committee member Dr. Lucy Shapiro (also Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology), interdisciplinary cooperation is no new concept. She and colleagues in other disciplines have been working together since the symbiotic evolution of technology and biology enabled the study of questions that no one even knew could be asked. Dr. Shapiro says, "The future is in decoding living things. We have reached the point now where the kinds of questions we’re asking in biology can only be answered by using computer science, engineering, biomechanical engineering, physics, and chemistry." She has a student in her own lab getting a Ph.D. in applied physics.

Stanford is heavily involved in encouraging and facilitating interaction among SGF fellows. Events such as the fall class welcome dinner and the spring SGF Symposium are designed in large part to bring together students and ideas from multiple disciplines. The new James H. Clark Center for biomedical Engineering and Sciences will advance this interaction dramatically by putting students who are concentrating in different disciplines together at the same lab bench.

Researchers from different departments will also benefit from working in close proximity. Biologists will be able to take advantage of innovations in engineering and physics to open new avenues of inquiry, while physicists and engineers will obtain insights into how information transfer is done in a living cell, yielding new algorithms for computing and artificial intelligence. None of this will change traditional department structure, but Dr. Shapiro emphasizes, "People in departments might live differently, interact differently, teach differently." Courses will be designed to integrate fields that were once considered disparate, thus supporting entirely new ways of studying and teaching science and engineering.

Advances at Stanford can easily jump into the center of the Silicon Valley. Dr. Shapiro does basic research in her lab, but in the course of her work, she discovered an enzyme that has led to a potentially new class of antibiotics. At this point she will turn over the project to the non-academic world. Dr. Shapiro describes research at Stanford in the context of the Silicon Valley: "The two are like intersecting circles with a significant area of overlap. We would be foolish not to look at how our basic research can be used productively. Silicon Valley is not just the Silicon Valley of computers and information technology; it's the Silicon Valley of biotech. This is the great excitement, and I think that the incomparable strength of Stanford is that we are able to bridge the two."

Terrific advances in biology, engineering, and newer fields such as biomechanical and biomedical engineering allow scientists to understand for the first time the dynamics of liquid flow in circulatory systems, how to make bone matrix, and how to open arteries in the heart with stents. Dr. Shapiro believes beyond a doubt that none of these advances would be possible without great students: "Students are the central core of all the discoveries that are going on at Stanford. Our training of them, our working with them, our nurturing of them is crucial. They are the next generation, and we have to be able to attract the very best students; the Stanford Graduate Fellowships program allows us to compete." If we consider the Clark Center to be both an outgrowth of years of successful cross-disciplinary research at Stanford and a physical starting point for new leaps ahead in science, medicine, and engineering that will benefit humanity, it is imperative to keep in mind Dr. Shapiro's remark that the Stanford Graduate Fellowships program is the cornerstone of the Clark Center.