Paul Boyer. UCLA, Unabashed.
Dr. Boyer’s 1997 Nobel Prize for Chemistry honors his pioneering investigation of the formation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) – the molecule that provides the energy for biological reactions and processes in all living things. He was the founding director of UCLA’s Molecular Biology Institute.
“I’ve always been interested in how things work, particularly living things. My field is molecular biology, investigating the unusual properties of biological systems. I’ve been at it for sixty years. It’s quite addictive.
“I believe the very best work happens when research and training are intermixed. Many of my most valued colleagues have been the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with educated imaginations, fresh perspectives and questions no one had asked.
Lots of institutions dispense existing knowledge. The mission of a research university is something more: to produce new knowledge.
“The Nobel work solved a classic problem — how energy is captured and used in living cells. I’d been studying this unsuccessfully for years. Then, in 1970, looking back through the old data, I saw what all of us had missed: Energy wasn’t used to create a key substance. It was used to release that substance in the cell. From that moment, we were on the path to understanding how cells obtain the energy to serve the needs of living things.
“UCLA research is an enormous, diverse enterprise. Just look at the breadth and depth of new knowledge that flows from here year after year.
UCLA has a worldwide reputation for creating knowledge across an astounding range of inquiry. How does it do that?
“But, there’s another factor that’s less apparent but equally remarkable — a unique, deliberate research culture here that capitalizes upon that breadth and depth and thrives on interchange among researchers and disciplines. This may not sound unusual, but — in too many academic settings — competition trumps cooperation.
“You know what lures me back on campus when I could be home, working on my low backhand volley? There are a dozen or more research groups here, moving beyond my work, asking their own questions about protein structure and function, stem cells, gene splicing and cancer.
“And who knows what else?”
UCLA, Unabashed.
Eli Broad Brad Delson Diane Watson Julia Gouw Sherry Lansing
Moctesuma Esparza Richard Ziman Warren Furutani Betsy Knapp Karen Bass
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