Established in 1999 at Stanford University on the promise of $150 million donation from Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape Communications, the future of the project was threatened in 2001 when Clark held back $60 million in protest against George W. Bush’s imposition of restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research. The university continued with the project after receiving the amount withheld from a second anonymous donor. In its present instantiation, the project is designed to forge multidisciplinary collaboration in both research and teaching across a number of humanities and science disciplines, but which has a strong biomedical foundation. This is reflected in the construction and completion of the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences in 2003 on the Stanford campus, which is designed as the hub of the project, and to house 42 faculty members, as well as 600-700 researchers and support staff in 225,000 square feet of space. Fellowships are offered for a three-year period during which time they do not have to teach or apply for grant so they can work full-time on their research. An important focus of the project, but by no means the only one, is research addressing the protein-folding problem. Where the humanities fit into the scheme of things is not clear, except for some loosely formulated commitment to dealing with social ethical issues in biomedical research. Stanford, while the first to implement such an ambitious program of multidisciplinary research, is now not alone. Similar models of ‘big science’ have come to fruition with on other major university campuses. One is the Harvard Bauer Center for Genomics Research, another is the University of Washington Genome Sequencing Center and yet another is the Genomics Research Building at Duke University, while MIT has committed itself to the Computational and Systems Biology Initiative. In addition to these university-led initiatives, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis via the Novartis Research Foundation has come up with $250 million to establish a Genomics Research Institute in La Jolla, which will work in collaboration with the likes the Scripps Research Institute. Without substantial contributions from philanthropists, it is hard to see all these initiatives being sustained at their current levels of commitment, given the rather precarious state of the US economy at present. As for Europe, bundling together such a broad range of scientific disciplines on such a large scale is probably beyond the reach of individual countries, and if deemed desirable (a question raised by some scientists), it would require cross-national cooperation backed, for example, by substantial EU funding. As for disciplines such psychology, the only recent and comparable, but much smaller-scale, enterprise is the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington Seattle, co-directors Patricia K. Kuhl and Andrew N. Meltzoff, which was initially funded by an anonymous donor.
See Genomics, Human Connectome Project (HCP), Human Genome Project (HGP), Interdisciplinarity, Protein-folding problem