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A century of discovery
Centennial celebrates biology department’s world-class standing
By Tim Stoddard
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A closer look: BU undergraduates peer into the microscopic world in 1958. Photo by BU Photo Services |
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When BU offered its first biology course in 1904, the word gene had not yet been coined. Looking back at those early days, Geoffrey Cooper marvels at how little was known about the genetic underpinnings of life. “In the past 100 years,” he says, “biologists have uncovered secrets of life and its processes that would have been unimaginable to those first BU students bold enough to turn to the newly founded department of biology. What they dreamed of, we now claim with confidence.”
The College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences department of biology celebrates its centennial on November 12 and 13 with a reception and colloquium honoring the alumni, students, and faculty who have shaped the department into one of the premier centers for the study of life sciences. Cooper, a professor of biology and chair
of the department, and Jeffrey Henderson, dean of Arts and Sciences, will welcome alumni and reflect on the evolution of the department over the past century. On Saturday several CAS and GRS alumni will discuss the frontiers
of research in the fields of ecology, neuroscience, and cell and molecular biology. Department faculty will also highlight current and future research efforts, and there will be tours of the new Life Science and Engineering Building at 24 Cummington St., which is set to open in May 2005.
In a letter to the biology department, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino (Hon.’01) congratulated the University for its distinguished research and teaching in the life sciences. “The City of Boston is very fortunate to have a university that has devoted so many resources to such an important field,” he writes. “On behalf of the people of the City of Boston, I send my most heartfelt best wishes to the Boston University community as they celebrate the Biology Centennial.”
Not just a fad
Up until 1904, BU students interested in science had to trek over to MIT for courses in biology, chemistry, and physics. The University trustees decided that year, however, to introduce biology to the College of Liberal Arts, and they recruited Arthur Weysse, an MIT professor of biology, to head up the new department.
By 1907, Weysse had wooed six biology majors to the nascent department, and the numbers were growing, partly in response to international interest in the theories of Gregor Mendel, the hermitic Austrian monk who had discovered the laws of inheritance in pea plants some 40 years earlier. “Biology is a science whose boundaries are incessantly widening,” Weysse wrote in a 1907 Bostonia article. “New facts are published at a rate that fairly takes one’s breath away; new theories are continually being advanced.”
Weysse believed that biology was integral to a liberal education, but his courses on botany, physiology, and hygiene received a cool reception from CLA colleagues, many of whom saw his arrival as the prelude to a spreading technology craze. Seeking to dispel rumors of a techno-takeover at the college, Bostonia’s editors wrote in 1904, “There is no intention of developing exclusively or to excess the study of the Natural Sciences. The College is still a college of Liberal Arts, not a school of Technology.”
Weysse seemed bemused by his colleagues’ anxiety, and the notion that biology was only a passing interest. “Occasionally,” he wrote in Bostonia, “we are told that [biological courses] are merely a catering on the part of our faculties to a sort of scientific fad, which has been reflected like a wave from the great industrial progress of our people into the cloisters of our temples of learning — a wave which some profess to see already receding. Prospective students become infected with a scientific mania, and if they cannot obtain such courses in one college, will go to another where they can.”
But the sciences were here to stay, and the department of biology was growing steadily and attracting innovative faculty. George Fulton, former department chair, pioneered the study of microvascular diseases with his blood flow studies in the 1950s and 1960s. Lynn Margulis, a former CAS professor of biology, developed the now-famous endosymbiotic theory of eukaryotic evolution in the 1960s. Controversial at the time, her theory is now widely accepted as explaining a major step in the evolution of complex organisms.
BU biology today
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Geoffrey Cooper, a CAS professor of biology and department chair, at the new biology laboratories in the Life Science and Engineering Building, which opens next May. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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The biology department today is one of the largest in Arts and Sciences, with some 50 faculty, 150 graduate students, and 800 undergraduate majors. BU has supported a recent department expansion, adding 16 new faculty positions since the mid-1990s and acquiring new instrumentation for DNA sequencing, microarray analysis, proteomics, mass spectrometry, and microscopy.
The new appointments have already raised the bar in one of the most important aspects of research: funding. Over the past six years, Cooper says, research funding from outside sources such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health has doubled, to more than $10 million annually. Cooper has focused the departmental growth in three areas that he says will benefit most from advances in genetics technologies: cell regulation and development, molecular ecology and evolution, and neurobiology. “One of the things that’s special about us is that we really are a department of biology,” Cooper says, “and that’s in contrast to the vast majority of universities, where departments of
biology have split into smaller fragments rather than staying as an integrated whole. My vision has been to maintain the balance between the different areas of biology and to try to build bridges between the organismal biologists, say, and the molecular biologists and neurobiologists.”
In the coming decade, Cooper plans to recruit faculty for about 10 additional new positions, and he says that this continued expansion is supported largely by the ample space allotted to biology in the Life Science and Engineering building. He isn’t sure what BU’s new researchers may turn up in their investigations, but he’s confident that they’ll be at the vanguard of their discipline in the next 100 years. “I’m looking for the young people we’ve brought in to become leaders in their field,” he says, “and to make the discoveries that constitute fundamental new advances.”
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November 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations