Second
Inaugural Address of Jeffrey Sean Lehman
As
President of Cornell University
New York
City
October
15, 2003
Dr. Fauci, Distinguished Colleagues, Friends of Cornell:
This
morning we are privileged to be here on Cornell’s Manhattan campus, where students
at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City come to the most
exhilarating city in the world to study medicine and prepare themselves for
lives of inquiry and service. We
are continuing an inaugural week that began on Sunday at the campus of the
Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar and that will conclude tomorrow at the
Ithaca campus of Cornell University.
Great
universities help to advance scientific understanding of our world’s unifying
forces. In my remarks this
morning, I would like to talk about how Cornell’s leadership in the sciences is
associated with a strong culture of intellectual collaboration. And I would like to talk about how that
culture has spawned a longstanding and ever-expanding presence for Cornell in
New York City.
When Cornell University was founded in
1865, it embodied a revolutionary vision of higher education. Forged in the aftermath of the
industrial revolution and the Civil War, Cornell was designed from the outset to
be coeducational, nonsectarian, and open to students of all races, and to be a
university where outstanding classical liberal education would share the
intellectual stage equally and comfortably with outstanding scientific
education. From the beginning,
that education had included the study of agriculture, veterinary science, and
premedical instruction for students.
But it took 35 years to fulfill the Founders’ desire to include a true
medical school.
In 1898, the trustees accepted a gift
from Oliver Payne to establish the Cornell University Medical College in
Manhattan, on First Avenue, between 27th and 28th
streets. Why was the four-year
Medical College placed here, when the rest of the university – including arts
and sciences, engineering, agriculture, veterinary medicine, and a two-year
medical program – was in Ithaca?
Because it was the best way to ensure that the teaching of medicine
would be truly world class.
By the end of the nineteenth century it
had become evident that a great medical education required strong intellectual
collaboration between a great medical school and at least one great
hospital. Here in New York City,
faculty and students at our medical college would have access to some of the
finest hospitals in the world. In
the 1920’s, Cornell forged a permanent alliance with what is now New York –
Presbyterian Hospital. In 1932,
the two institutions moved together to their present location. By 1938, the university had
discontinued all medical instruction in Ithaca, requiring that all medical
students conduct a full four years of studies here in New York City.
It was a propitious judgment that the
trustees made in 1898. For here in
New York City, we have truly thrived.
The College has enhanced the life of the City, and it has made
transformative contributions to global health.
The work on this campus led to the first
double-blind experiment to test the efficacy of pharmaceuticals. The work on this campus led to the
first organic synthesis of penicillin.
The work on this campus led to the Pap smear. The work on this campus led to the synthesis of oxytocin and
a Nobel Prize. And the inspiring
history of the Medical College was made even more exciting by a series of
developments around the time of the College’s centennial.
As the twentieth century was drawing to a
close, the College experienced a renaissance, renewing its collaborative ties
in order to permit ever more significant contributions to human
well-being. The vision of Joan and
Sandy Weill, coupled with the institutional leadership of Dean Antonio Gotto,
forged a renewed commitment to make this Medical College the center of
innovative education, pioneering scientific research, and transformative
clinical research in what is truly a new era of understanding about human
health.
What insights define this new era? I am not a scientist myself. But since being selected to become
Cornell’s eleventh President, I have had the opportunity to speak with many
Cornell scientists who have taught me a great deal about the contemporary science. Some are already Nobel laureates; some
are surely destined to become Nobel laureates in the future. In one of the most interesting meetings
I had last spring, a scientist began with the observation, “Today we
understand: it’s all one biology.”
It’s all one biology. The projects to sequence and map
genomes – human, mouse, zebrafish, mosquito, nematode, tomato, rice, yeast, and
more – have already shown us that the many different life forms that populate
this planet have far more in common than any of us ever imagined. The differences among species no longer
seem so stark. New understandings
are as likely to have implications across species as within a single
species. That awareness has, in
turn, opened broad new frontiers of inquiry and created entirely new
opportunities for understanding and for therapeutic intervention.
Let me take a minute to give an example
of how this new understanding might affect human health in the future.
In the year 2000, Cornell alumnus Philip
Reilly published a widely read book called Abraham Lincoln’s DNA and Other
Adventures in Genetics. One
chapter of the book explains the possibilities of a medical treatment called
somatic cell gene therapy. It
describes the case of a boy named David who was born with a rare disease called
Severe Combined Immune Deficiency.
Because of a small genetic error, his immune system could not make the T
cells and B cells he needed to protect him against potentially lethal bacteria,
fungi, and viruses. For twelve
years, David lived in a specially designed sterile environment. He became known as “the boy in the
bubble.” When he was twelve, David
decided to undergo a risky bone marrow transplant. During the surgery he acquired the Epstein-Barr virus, and
ultimately the virus took his life.
In his book, Dr. Reilly explains how
somatic cell gene therapy could, in principle, help a patient like David. Somatic cell gene therapy begins with
the identification of a virus that is not injurious to humans. This benign virus is used as a
so-called “vector” to carry normal genes into the patient’s own bone
marrow. If the treatment works,
some of the vectors insinuate themselves into the patient’s cells and stimulate
them to behave normally. The hope
held out by such a therapeutic approach is that patients would be spared the
immunological risks and problems of donor scarcity that are associated with
organ transplants.
On
the other hand, somatic cell gene therapy carries its own risks. In the late 1990’s, a patient named
Jesse Gelsinger who was participating in clinical trials in Philadelphia died
when it turned out that the vector being used was not benign. The virus that was inserted into his
body triggered a lethal immune system response.
Yet despite these risks, and despite the
relatively slow pace of development of gene therapy during the 1990’s, Dr.
Reilly’s book predicts that by 2010 the technique’s promise would finally be
realized, and that somatic cell gene therapy will emerge as a powerful and
routine treatment for a wide variety of genetic disorders.
Recent developments on this campus
suggest that Dr. Reilly might well be right. Seven weeks ago, CNN reported that Dr. Michael Kaplitt,
Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery at the Weill Cornell Medical
College, had been the first person in the world to use gene therapy as a treatment
for Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease occurs when certain areas of the brain lose their
normal supply of a calming chemical called L-DOPA and become hyperactive. The patient, a 55-year-old man named
Nathan Klein, had a severe and longstanding form of Parkinson’s disease that
had been unresponsive to any known therapy.
In the surgery, which took place here at
New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Kaplitt used a vector that, in
collaborative research he had conducted a decade earlier, had been shown to be
a potentially safe and effective vehicle for gene therapy in the brain. Through the use of modern scanning
techniques, Dr. Kaplitt was able to insert the vector directly into the
affected area of Nathan Klein’s brain.
The vector was carrying a gene that triggers the production of a
chemical called GABA, which is believed to compensate for the loss of L-DOPA.
The surgery marked the beginning of clinical trials to evaluate its safety and effectiveness as an approach to treating the symptoms and arresting the development of Parkinson’s. It will probably be a year before
Dr.
Kaplitt and his colleagues can begin to make strong statements about the
therapy’s likely effectiveness.
But whether or not this particular intervention is the one that ushers
in Dr. Reilly’s predicted new era of treatments, it is instructive to reflect
on its underpinnings of intellectual collaboration.
Modern medicine depends on broad
collaborations. Dr. Kaplitt was
the co-leader of a team that included neurosurgeons, molecular biologists and
engineers. And such teams are as
necessary for bench research in the life sciences as they are for clinical
research.
Great universities must continue to
advance scientific understanding of our world’s unifying forces. Today we recognize that, in order to
understand the unifying forces of biology, many different disciplines are
required. To appreciate the likely
influence of a particular gene, one needs experts on plant genomics, animal
genomics, and human genomics. To
analyze the enormous quantity of data that specifies gene structure and protein
structure, one needs experts on information science and computing. To understand the processes by which
genes and proteins operate, one needs expert chemists, physicists, and
engineers.
Cornell’s unique structure and history
have given it the ability to lead the new life sciences revolution. The revolutionary values of Cornell’s
nineteenth century founders caused it to evolve in ways that have given it a
unique advantage in twenty-first century life sciences research. For Cornell is the only one of
the world’s great universities that has – in addition to a medical college and
an arts and sciences college – colleges of agriculture, veterinary medicine,
engineering, and human ecology, and a faculty of computing and information
science, all of which include scientists who are actively contributing to the
post-genomic research revolution.
Today approximately one third of the
professorial faculty in upstate New York, as well as the entire professorial
faculty here in New York City, is involved with the study of living
organisms. Students flock to
Cornell to study the new biology – Cornell produces more undergraduate life
science majors who go on to earn Ph.D.’s than any other university. And Cornell has committed half a
billion dollars to a new life sciences initiative. This initiative will ensure that Cornell’s potential
continues to be translated into new discoveries. Just as significantly, the initiative is drawing humanists
and social scientists into the collaborative mix, in order to ensure that the
ethical and sociological implications of post-genomic research are considered
with the same care as the scientific implications.
This is all enormously exciting for
Cornell. But this morning I would
like to speak about what we, as individuals and as a university, must do to
ensure that these institutional virtues yield benefits for all humanity. I want to spend a moment considering
what intellectual collaboration really entails. I want to consider what institutional preconditions are
necessary for healthy collaborations.
And I want to look at two geographic axes of intellectual collaboration
that have particular salience for our campus in New York City. One axis runs through the heart of New
York City. A second runs from
Ithaca to York Avenue.
For high school students and
undergraduate students, intellectual collaboration is the exception rather than
the norm. Notwithstanding the
occasional so-called “group project” or work with a “lab partner,” students are
usually asked to take tests and write papers on their own, without any help
from others. This is a good
thing. Just as athletes must
develop their own bodies individually, so all of us must develop our own
minds. In order to build essential
stores of information, develop habits of thought, and come to recognize our own
abilities to think and do, we must both endure the frustrations that attend
difficult individual work and experience the satisfactions that follow from
successful effort.
But after we complete our student years,
things change. As adults, we far
more often find ourselves undertaking tasks in concert with others. That is especially important true in
experimental scientific research, where we often find giant research teams
engaged in hierarchically structured efforts that resemble work teams in the
private sector. But it also is
becoming more and more true in theoretical domains of science, in the social
sciences, and even in the humanities.
Today interdisciplinary research teams regularly develop insights that
never would have emerged from sets of atomized researchers working in
isolation.
Return with me for a moment to the
problem of gene therapy. Almost
two decades before Dr. Kaplitt and his team developed a method for treating the
symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in people, Cornell horticultural scientist John
Sanford joined forces with Cornell nanotechnology experts Edward Wolf and
Nelson Allen to develop a way to protect plants from equally dangerous viruses. Only by combining their expertise from
two very different fields could these researchers invent a technique that went
on to transform agriculture around the world.
As a society, and as a university, we
therefore have a stake in nurturing the background conditions that make it more
likely that two or more researchers will develop a fruitful collaborative
relationship. And we have a
particular stake in understanding what leads a small set of intellectual peers
from different disciplines to develop a fruitful collaboration.
The literature suggests a variety of
different factors. I think it is
helpful to distinguish two different categories of background conditions. The first category concerns the
individuals. The second concerns
their institutional environment.
At the level of the individual, scholars
have identified a variety of personal motivations that might lead researchers
to collaborate with others. While
I have not seen an analysis of what qualities of the individual researchers are
likely to produce fruitful research partnerships, I would not be
surprised for the answer to be that the researchers share a sensibility about
what is interesting while at the same time bring different methodological
perspectives or talents to the relationship. And I would certainly not be surprised to learn that
the most successful collaborators are people who are open to different
approaches and perspectives, and are eager to engage. In my talk in Qatar on Sunday, I talked about how openness
and engagement characterize a transnational perspective on humanity; those same
qualities surely characterize fruitful interdisciplinary intellectual
collaborations as well.
But what about institutions? What kind of institutional environment
nurtures successful collaborations?
A number of scholars have noted how many collaborations begin by
happenstance, as the result of chance encounters, spontaneous third-party
introductions, or informal communications. And they have suggested that this might imply something
about the importance of environmental factors such as spatial proximity. For myself, I would be prepared to draw
even broader inferences.
Knowing that collaborations are often the
product of a chance encounter, we must remain alert to whether the
organizational and architectural structure of our universities facilitates or
inhibits such encounters. Being
part of one university gives people a shared identity that can make
collaboration easier and more natural, but we must also take care to ensure
that people are regularly exposed to their colleagues and their work, so that
they are aware of the range of potential intellectual partners available to
them. And then, the university has
to take full advantage of modern technology to facilitate informal
communication as well as formal communication, to ensure that a few thousand
miles of distance between New York and Qatar, or a few hundred miles of
distance between Ithaca and Manhattan, do not impede the flow of ideas.
Finally, at a more general level, the
institutional culture must support fruitful collaborative work. It must celebrate joint insights every
bit as much as it celebrates individual insights. And it must channel our competitive drives in healthy and
productive directions, directions that respect the need for collaborations
across institutional boundaries, even within a competitive world.
Today the culture of intellectual
collaboration at Cornell’s Ithaca campus and at the Weill Cornell Medical
College is truly admirable. I must
begin by expressing my deep respect for the faculty who have worked to make our
campus in Qatar such an extraordinary success. This weekend, I had the
opportunity to see first-hand how Weill-Cornell Medical College in Qatar is
already having the effects that the Qatari leadership and we desired, bringing
exceptionally talented students from around the Gulf region together to study
in a coeducational environment, in a curriculum of comparable rigor to what we
provide in New York. The gifted architect
Arata Isozaki has blended architectural elements from the Cornell campus in
Ithaca, the Weill Cornell Medical campus in Manhattan, and the Arab-Islamic
tradition to create an astonishing building. And because the campus is designed to provide both
undergraduate premedical education professional M.D. education, pedagogic
elements of each American campus are being reflected there as well. And our
campus has inspired other academic institutions to come as well, to participate
in the creation of an multi-university Education City and to support a tiny
nation whose farsighted administration is a beacon of hope for that region.
Closer to home, the Weill Cornell Medical
College sits on an axis of institutional collaboration with other outstanding
institutions that runs through the heart of New York City. The permanent alliance formed in the
1920’s between Cornell and New York Hospital has blossomed and grown, expanding
to include the Hospital for Special Surgery and the other members of the
Healthcare System, and expanding again as New York Hospital merged with
Columbia Presbyterian, so that we were drawn into a close and productive
partnership with Columbia University.
In addition, since the year 2000
researchers on both our Ithaca campus and our Manhattan campus have been
participants in a collaborative research and training program called the
Tri-Institutional Research Program.
In the Tri-Institutional Program, we have joined forces with Rockefeller
University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to support collaborative
research programs in chemical biology, computational biology, and cancer and
developmental biology – research programs of a scale and quality that none of
the three universities could undertake on its own. I will be having lunch today with the Presidents of several
other prominent universities with strong presences in New York City, and I look
forward to talking with them about how we can continue to nurture intellectual
collaborations across our institutional boundaries for the good of all New
York, and for the good of the world.
As for the collaborations between faculty
on our Ithaca campus and faculty here on the Weill Cornell campus, they are
plentiful and inspiring. To pick a
few examples, today faculty members at the two campus are cooperating:
·
To
examine life-course transitions and social integration for aging adults,
·
To
control arrhythmias in human and animal hearts,
·
To
study post-traumatic stress disorder among children following September 11, and
·
To
develop ways to read magnetic resonance images even when the patient can’t hold
still.
And later this morning, I will have the
opportunity to visit the laboratory of Dr. Frederick Maxfield, who, in
collaboration with researchers from Ithaca, is developing and using new optical
microscopy and biophysical techniques to study the properties of living cells.
This brings me to my final point. Cornell’s presence in New York City
began over 100 years ago because an intellectual imperative required us to
locate our medical college here.
Today, other intellectual imperatives have led Cornell to nurture an
ever-expanding presence within the five boroughs that goes far beyond medicine
and the life sciences.
Cornell is in the workplace, advancing knowledge of alcohol,
drug and health issues. Cornell is
in union halls and corporate headquarters, helping organized labor and
management increase their effectiveness.
Cornell is in the South Bronx, working with community groups on new ways
to reduce air pollution, and in Brooklyn, carrying out participatory research
on sustainable agriculture with local gardeners. Cornell is in disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout the
city, teaching young people reading, critical thinking and leadership
skills. And Cornell is on Wall
Street, developing innovative solutions to practical problems in computational
and mathematical finance, portfolio optimization, and risk management.
New York City is an educational venue for our faculty and
students, a research site and an intellectual and cultural resource, a central
focus of our efforts in outreach and extension. I believe it is inevitable that in the decades ahead, the
interdependence of our two New York campuses will continue to deepen, and that
faculty and students who name the Ithaca campus as their primary base will
spend more and more time in New York City.
Cornell’s presence in this city speaks to what the
university is and what it aspires to be. Cornell is not an Upstate
university. Cornell is not a New
York City university. Cornell is
everywhere in New York State. And
as I mentioned in Doha on Sunday, Cornell has become a transnational university
whose presence is felt everywhere in the United States and around the world.
These are great and challenging times. They summon us all to offer our best ideas and energy to serve the evolving needs of humanity. It is an extraordinary privilege for me to have been called to serve as Cornell’s eleventh President, and I look forward to working with all of you in the years to come.
