In putting together Cornell's New Life Sciences Initiative, the university has just announced its cornerstone piece for the restructuring of the life sciences on campus -- the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology.

The new institute will provide a bridge for different departments related to basic cell biology and will be housed in the new Life Sciences Technology Building. The building rising on Alumni Field is scheduled for completion in 2008.

Director Scott Emr envisions a center that applies all the major disciplines within the life sciences, such as genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry, to the workings of the cell itself. Emr, who will take charge in February 2007, is currently professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"The Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology is meant to raise the stature of cell biology on campus and to make it into a world-class institute, and with Emr I think it will," said Anthony Bretscher, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics.

The institute is being planned as an interdisciplinary center that links cell biology and the physical sciences, and in which physics, chemistry, applied engineering, chemical engineering, computational sciences and the newest technologies might be used to advance human understanding of the cell.

One of Emr's first tasks will be to help hire 11 new faculty members. The institute, Emr said, will hire researchers who can take an interdisciplinary approach in three main directions: developing new imaging techniques that allow researchers to visualize events in cells; using computational biology, which combines mathematics and computer science to model biology; and seeking better understanding of cellular structure at the atomic level, where proteins and other components can be seen working as a whole system.

"We don't want to know what one piston looks like. We want to see the engine, which is six pistons, a block and wires," said Emr. "So we want to work with complexes of proteins, and that will be the new proteomics of the next era, not individual proteins but the complexes they make and the machines that they form."

The new institute is part of the New Life Sciences fund-raising campaign and will eventually be funded by gifts and endowments.