Making a Quantum Leap : Upstart UC Irvine Bids to Move Into Top Ranks in Research--And the Ivy Hasn’t Had Chance to Grow
A couple of years ago, the British Broadcasting Corp. telephoned Jackie Porter at UC Irvine, wanting to set up an interview with her boss, memory researcher Gary Lynch. The curly-haired professor, who reminds Porter of Gabriel Kaplan on the old “Welcome Back, Kotter” TV program, was scheduled to speak before the International Brain Assn. at Oxford University.
“I told her I’d see what I could do to arrange it, but that I wasn’t sure because he had so many things scheduled,” Porter said. “The woman on the phone said in a very proper British accent, ‘A program on memory without Gary Lynch is like Hamlet without the prince.’ ”
Then last winter, Porter was waiting at the office for Lynch with the December issue of Esquire magazine. It was the issue singling out people for contributions in various walks of life. Lynch was one of the designees, cited as a “charismatic and controversial leader in memory study.”
“You finally hit the big time,” Porter told Lynch. “You’re in the same issue as Magic Johnson.”
The Magic Man and the Sweet Prince may be exalted company for a UCI psychobiologist, but in the competitive and sometimes high-powered world of academic research--where the real supercolliders often are reputations and egos--free publicity never hurts.
It is researchers like Lynch and a host of others--in fields ranging from particle physics to laser research to mental illness--that UCI is counting on to propel it into the upper ranks of American universities. It is the neighborhood where the mailboxes now bear names like UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford and UCLA.
Some individuals at UCI already have world-class reputations, such as F. Sherwood (Sherry) Rowland, who pioneered research into the depletion of the ozone layer caused by synthetic chemicals, and physicist Frederick Reines, who co-discovered the existence of subatomic particles known as neutrinos about 30 years ago. In addition, the 2-year-old Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic was described as among the best in the country by a spokesman for the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery; the Brain Imaging Center on campus is one of between 15 to 20 centers in the world using the so-called PET Scanner to study the brain’s activity; and psychobiologist Carl Cotman recently appeared on a broadcast of “20/20” to discuss his research on Alzheimer’s disease.
Thus, like the brash young heavyweight who is confident he can take on the big boys, UCI believes that it is becoming one of the serious contenders in the academic prize ring. One release from the university touts the school as already having “established a national reputation as one of the major research universities in the country.”
Interviews with persons outside the UCI family don’t necessarily reflect that view, but that is almost beside the point. In academic research, hyperbole not only is tolerated, it is expected.
“Everyone says they’re great,” says one UCI official. “They’re sure not going to tell you where they’re not great.”
The most recent figures from the National Science Foundation rank UCI 60th in the amount of federal funds given for research and development. Three years earlier, UCI ranked 80th. The National Institutes of Health, considered a significant yardstick of the strength of a school’s medical research, gave UCI $21.3 million in 1987, putting it 58th out of 456 universities. In 1981, the NIH awarded UCI $9.5 million, ranking it 66th.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has given “Research 1” status to about 70 of the nation’s top universities. UCI is one of the 45 public universities on the list. Ten years ago, UCI was not on the list.
So while UCI appears to be climbing the ladder, reputations as first-rate universities come slowly and grudgingly, especially for schools less than 25 years old, such as UCI. “A lot of this is intangibles,” said Robert Aaron, spokesman for the National Assn. of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. “It’s like nailing Jell-O to the wall. Using a sports analogy, say you’re talking about the Los Angeles Rams. It’s easy to gauge their performance--they either won or they lost. They either scored so many points or they didn’t. They either racked up so many yards or they didn’t. Colleges and universities aren’t like that.”
And while UCI has the advantage of being in the vaunted University of California system, it also perhaps is hurt by being compared to better-known siblings, like UCLA and Berkeley and the Wunderkind UC San Diego, which despite being a relatively young school ranked fifth on the most recent national list of total federal funds for research and development.
But UCSD is the glaring exception of a school that is catapulted into the upper ranks of research institutions before the ivy has had time to grow.
“How old are they?” Paul Miller, vice president of the New York-based Council for Financial Aid to Education, asked, speaking about UCI. When told the school opened in 1965, he replied, “You don’t make an institution in 25 years.”
In many ways, the effort of UCI’s medical school to attain prominence parallels that of the school as a whole. Stanley van den Noort was a neurologist on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland when he decided to join the UCI faculty in 1970. “We were in Cleveland and trying to find Irvine on the map and there was no such place,” van den Noort joked recently in his office.
What van den Noort found, he said, was “a pretty stinky medical school,” and one with virtually no research function. “I knew it was a dog when I looked at it, but I saw the opportunity,” van den Noort said. “Given the core resources of the university and given the location, there was every reason to believe it could become a great medical school.”
By 1973, van den Noort was the dean, succeeding Warren Bostick. Both recall that the medical school in Irvine wasn’t exactly welcomed into the UC family.
“There was grudging acceptance,” Bostick, who now teaches resident pathologists at UCI, said. “When you add one more child to the family with the same amount of food, the food has to be shared.”
“UCLA didn’t want us to succeed very much,” van den Noort said. “There are still people at UCLA who would like to close us down at the first opportunity.”
Asked if the in-fighting was real, van den Noort replied, “Oh, it’s real. There’s competition for resources within the university, and we were the ugly duckling and lots of people were out to kill us, mainly UCLA. . . . Periodically, someone at UCLA would release a statement saying, ‘Oh, they’re probably going to close down that medical school at Irvine’ and that would make it very difficult for us to recruit faculty and students.”
Van den Noort set out to solidify UCI’s status as a credible medical school. Over a period of several months, department heads and key faculty met Monday mornings at 6, setting a course in sometimes stormy sessions that would guide the medical school throughout the ‘70s. “It was an unusual time to have a meeting, but no one could claim that they had a conflict in their schedules,” van den Noort said.
From the start, he said, the sights were set high. “That was very clear from the beginning, that we wanted to become one of the leading institutions in the country as fast as we could get there and that we wanted to beat UCSD and beat UCLA and get up that tree just as fast as we could.”
That kind of intensity led to differences of opinion about tactics, especially among those satisfied with the status quo. “It got a little hairy at times,” van den Noort said. And when irresolvable differences arose? “There was a fair amount of chopping off of heads,” he said.
By the mid-1970s, UCI had a new research building and had taken over the county medical center in Orange, bolstering the medical school’s credibility.
The existence of the research facility opened up grant money, according to Wade Rose, the medical school’s assistant dean for community affairs and development. For an institution to do great medical research, it must have outstanding faculty and a place to do research. “Since that building opened, grants to the college just spiraled,” Rose said. “Because we had space, the faculty could undertake experiments, and because we had facilities in which to operate, we could apply for grants.”
The Brain Imaging Center is a prime example of how one good recruit begats another. Monte Buchsbaum came to UCI five years ago after a 16-year career at the National Institutes of Health because his boss at NIH, William Bunney, had come to UCI. “I saw Irvine as a place that was growing and really different from the (NIH) program at Bethesda, which was kind of static,” Buchsbaum said.
A professor of psychiatry, Buchsbaum runs the Brain Imaging Center. The PET Scanner (which stands for Positron Emission Tomography) not only photographs the brain but shows its activity while performing certain tasks. It is assisting in research involving dreams, memory, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, among others.
“The human brain, as Carl Sagan said, may be the most complicated structure in the universe,” Buchsbaum said. “The reason we’re sort of back at the beginning with humans (in research) is that we haven’t had the tools for investigating different structures of the brain in a living human brain. So there’s been a lot of learning about the brains of animals and how they work, but that is difficult to apply to an understanding of mental illness.”
UCI medical school officials talk as if greatness is its manifest destiny.
“It’s a young campus, and it will be a powerhouse in research,” said Wade Rose, assistant dean for community affairs. “Perhaps the main reason right now is vacant land. We have so much flexibility in what we can do for the future that UCLA and Berkeley do not have. Both those campuses are built out.”
Psychobiologist Cotman, acknowledged by his peers as a leader in Alzheimer’s research, said the increased celebrity carries a price tag. On a recent day, he had about 40 phone messages on his desk. His imminent professional travel plans include a trip to Germany this month and France in September. “I’d like to have one (international) meeting a month, but it usually gets beyond that,” he said. “It’s sort of one of the responsibilities. When you’re one of the figures in the field, you have got to talk about the stuff.”
Currently, he said, the lab work is focusing on the mechanism by which the brain attempts to regenerate itself.
“I think it’s a great thrill to discover something every day,” he said. “Some days are better than others. Some days we undiscover something, but that means you’re learning something, too. That’s the real thrill of science--looking into the unknown.”
Cotman, who joined the faculty in 1968 as an assistant professor, said UCI’s neurosciences rank in the top five in the country.
“I think there would be some self-flattery in that,” said a distinguished neuroscientist not affiliated with UCI and who insisted on anonymity. “Maybe the top 10.”
As for the overall medical school, the source said, “It’s clearly not in the front rank. It’s not even within the front rank of medical schools in the state of California. By common consent, Stanford stands out as the premier private medical school in California and is substantially ahead of its nearest rival, USC. Among state institutions, UCSF has in the last 15 years emerged as one of the premier institutions in the country. . . . UCLA might well be regarded as the second med school within the state. Then UCSD. Then probably UCI would come next. Perhaps running neck-and-neck with UC Davis.”
Asked if UCI is being shortchanged because of its youth, the neuroscientist said, “It’s true that reputations sometimes outlive the reality of an institution, but it’s also true that it takes time to build a reputation, and you can’t build that very quickly. Very few places have been able to do that. Schools like Johns Hopkins are not good simply because they started over a hundred years ago. It’s very good because even today they have outstanding people in each of several departments. The reality is we’re not selling soap here. Scholarship is something that can be objectively assessed. No matter how good you say you are, it takes a minimum of a decade, probably 30 years, before you can say it really was an outstanding institution. . . . What people are saying about Irvine is they’ve made some good appointments recently, and it’ll be interesting to see how it develops.”
That view was corroborated by an official with a prestigious national peer review journal, who also asked not to be identified. “I know by reputation most of the good places in the country and if you asked me to name the 20 or 30 best, it never would have occurred to me to mention them,” he said.
“We receive a sizable proportion of all the important medical research done in this country, and we rarely get a manuscript from them. They wouldn’t compare with UCSF, which is one of the leading medical research schools in the country, or UCLA or UCSD. They’re way behind those three.”
UCI’s Rose said the yardstick he uses is the amount of NIH funding per faculty member. By that measure, he said, UCI ranks 40th of the 127 medical schools in the country.
And the future? “It’s a good school that’s going to get better,” Rose said. Is it Harvard? No way. It’s not Hopkins. It’s not UCSF. It’s not Case. It’s nothing like the Mayo clinics. But it will be. There were questions about whether we could establish ourselves back in the late ‘60s. There were questions about shutting the school down as a means of taking care of whatever resource problems UCLA had then. Those questions aren’t raised anymore.”
