Building an Alphabet of Excellence

I set up shop at UCSF in February of 1968. There were seemingly acres of laboratory space in which I could play. It was talent, not space, that was in short supply. The UCSF of then could not possibly have compiled a complete alphabet of excellence, such as you have found in this issue of UCSF Magazine.

Things changed rapidly. UCSF soon began three decades of remarkable growth that took it into the ranks of the finest health science centers in the world. And as night follows day, scarcity moved from talent to real estate. We became renowned for co-opting rest rooms on behalf of faculty offices, for extracting more cutting-edge advances out of less space than perhaps any other enterprise on planet Earth.

For a while, we rationalized the space limitation into a virtue. In contrast to the proverbial bad behavior of overcrowded rats in a Skinner box, we argued, our scientists found benefit in the proximity enforced upon them by dense packing. They were compelled by circumstance to develop and sustain the collaborative spirit that has become our trademark. The truth is, of course, that collaboration does not spring full grown from overpopulation. It took hard work to create the spirit of community that made UCSF into such a special place, and more hard work to sustain that spirit.

Eventually the game caught up with us. We found ourselves in a vise grip of geopolitics. We knew that, given the opportunity, we could be at the forefront of the advances in biomedicine that are sure to come in the 21st century. Instead, we found ourselves at risk of becoming spectators to those advances. So UCSF cast about for a departure that would unharness our creative energies. We found it at Mission Bay, where we could expand our enterprise in a systematic and visionary way.

By now, UCSF has almost $1 billion worth of new facilities under construction or in various stages of planning and design. We have also begun the long and complex planning required to construct a new hospital - another billion-dollar project. We have been left largely to our own devices in funding all of this. To date, the state of California has promised no more than $80 million. We hope for more. But we are leaving nothing to chance, having launched the $1.4 billion Campaign for UCSF, almost one third of which will be devoted to capital projects.

Much of our current expansion is taking place at Mission Bay. But the benefit will be felt at our other sites as well, particularly our venerable campus on Parnassus Heights and our Cancer Center at Mount Zion Hospital. And the benefit will extend far beyond research alone. We will be able to pursue new opportunities in health care, teaching, and community service.

Why do we exert ourselves so diligently on behalf of research? Because the search for new knowledge underlies all else that we do. It creates a climate of enquiry that is vital to institutions of higher learning. It serves as an armature for great teaching. It is the necessary platform for training future scientists and technologists. It advances human health and fuels the productivity of our economy. It creates the understanding that ennobles us all.

No one could reliably predict the face of UCSF a generation from now. But one thing seems certain. Future editors of this magazine will have no trouble compiling many alphabets of excellence that describe the place. And the commonweal will be the better for that abundance.

J. Michael Bishop, MD,
Chancellor
University of California, San Francisco