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A PROPOSAL TO DR. AND MRS, ARNOLD 0. BECKMAN

FROM THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY

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The Rockefeller University has a unique organizational structure in which
the role of the professor is distinctive from that which exists at other
research institutions and university campuses. Since its founding, the
University has been organized into separate laboratories, each headed by one
or two tenured members of the staff who report directly to the President.

This organization into laboratories rather than departmental structures (which
often sets up barriers between disciplines), allows each professor and his
colleagues to pursue biomedical research that transcends conventional
seientific and medical specialties. At the same time, they are encouraged to
be fully involved in a free, yet highly cohesive academic community. A
professor's field of interest is never confined by functional or title
limitations, nor are laboratories held to a specific disciplinary orientation.

There are now about 55 such laboratories ranging in size from two or
three professional staff to as many as 25 or 30 staff and students. The
laboratories are devoted exclusively to research. They tend to focus on major
problems for comparatively long periods of time and to combine several
scientific perspectives in approaching the research problen.

This framework, established 84 years ago and continued with remarkable
success today, is based on three ideas: Firat, phat the solution to a
genuinely significant scientific problem often requires the integration of
many disciplines within a small group of talented investigators. Second, that
the combination of disciplines changes from time to time as a problem is more
deeply understood or solved. For example, a laboratory devoted to unraveling
the mechanisms of tumors may include a biochemist, an X-ray ecrystallographer,
an organic chemist, a virologist, as well as occasional collaborating
physicians from the University's clinical research hospital. Third, a
laboratory's research direction is determined solely by the senior professors,
in consultation with the President, largely unencumbered by any external
pressures.

The enormous power in this approach flows from the freedom provided each
senior member of the faculty to carry out research without any other
obligations, such as routine teaching or patient care. Working full-time and
year round on research, senior investigators may draw upon all of the
intellectual resources on the campus, and recruit younger research colleagues
from any field. Each laboratory charts its work independently but often
collaborates with other laboratories (for a month or for years) whenever
common needs or interest converge. At many other first-rank institutions,
rigid departmental constraints and other traditions or duties make such
intensely problem-oriented efforts almost impossible.
Endowed Professorships

All tenured faculty are paid entirely with income from the University's
endowment. As a major goal of its ten-year development program, the
University is seeking to obtain $25 million in endowment for professorships.
Meeting the goal is critical both to ensure continued support of the senior
faculty and to reinforce the University's tradition of complete investigative
independence.

At this time, the endowment required to support a professorship in
perpetuity at the University is $1.5 million. Although various fields
obviously require differing levels of overall laboratory support, this
guideline reflects reasonably accurately the total endowment needed to support
a senior member of the faculty. For planning purposes, it is estimated that
the endowment principal would be invested, at current earnings, to produce
income from which about six percent would be used for professorial salary,
employment benefits, and a modest contribution toward general laboratory
expenses and supplies. The balance of earnings would be returned to the
endowment for the chair to sustain its real value in perpetuity. The
University has a demonstrated record of success in managing its endowment
assets for sustained growth.

 

Within the past three years, the University has opened eight new
laboratories, carefully selecting the leaders for each of these groups with
three goals in mind. First, to sustain the University's mission of
fundamental research. Second, to seize those research opportunities that
relate directly to major unsolved human problems--fostering the applications
that, over the next generation, will make a genuine difference to the world.
Third, to advance our research leadership by adding a new generation of gifted
scientists, replacing those who have retired recently or who will retire
during the next decade.

One newly established group, the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology, is headed by Professor Robert G. Roeder, who was the James S.
McDonnell Professor in Biochemical Genetics at Washington University School of
Medicine in St. Louis before coming to the Rockefeller. Dr. Roeder is a
biochemist whose research foouses on the molecular basis of gene activity in
mammalian cells, particularly in processes such as cell growth,
differentiation, and division in both normal cells and in those invaded by
infection or transformed by DNA tumor viruses.

The cellular and viral genes that affect these processes are controlled
in large part at the level of transcription--the first step in the readout of
genetio information from DNA to a substance known as RNA. Dr. Roeder is
particularly interested in the biochemical mechanisms involved in this process
in individual genes. His pioneering work in transcription began while he was
a@ graduate student at the University of Washington. It led to the first
isolation and characterization of the family of enzymes that copy genetic
information directly from DNA, an achievement for which he was honored with
the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry in 1977.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Roeder developed systema outside living cells in
which individual genes cloned by recombinant DNA techniques were transcribed
precisely as when within the cell. More recently, he has been working to
identify various factors within the cell that mediate transcription and
describe DNA sequences that are responsible for specific aspects of gene
function. By demonstrating how the function of key factors is altered, this
research may help clarify the reasons for various growth and developmental
abnormalities. Ultimately, it may lead researchers to methods by which these
processes--and their pathological consequences, such as cancer--may be
controlled.

Dr. Roeder's laboratory group of more than 30 scientists is located in
the Tower building. Approximately 9,000 square feet of space has been
renovated and equipment purchased at a cost of $3 million to provide an
effective, safe, and efficient research environment. The laboratory is now
fully funotional, and there is an ongoing effort to seek funding from private
and public sources for these continuing research efforts. At the same tine,
the University is seeking private support to endow the chair which Dr. Roeder
holds.

ihe Proposal

The Rockefeller University proposes that Dr. and Mrs. Arnold 0. Beckman
consider establishing an Endowed University Professorship through a grant of
$1.5 million. We further propose that this Professorship be awarded to Dr.
Robert G. Roeder and, in recognition of this generous support, be named The
Arnold 0. and Mabel S. Beckman Professorship, should you so desire,

bc: Rodney W. Nichols
' DO Route

CF: Arnold 0. Beckman
SmithKline Beckman
Corporation