Renowned Biologist to Leave UCSD for Texas Job
A noted molecular biologist and pioneer in cancer genetics is leaving UC San Diego to found a University of Texas institute in San Antonio.
Wen-Hwa Lee, 39, will give up a professorship in UCSD’s School of Medicine to become professor and director at the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
The development marks the second time this summer that the medical school has learned it is losing a top researcher. Dr. Ivor Royston has notified UCSD officials that on Nov. 1 he will leave his positions as professor and director of clinical immunology to help found a private cancer institute.
UCSD officials did not return phone calls to ask about their reaction to the developments, which are unusual because UCSD more often is the recruiter rather than the loser in research personnel shifts.
In 1987, Lee’s research group was the first to determine the chemical sequence of the retinoblastoma gene, which had shortly before been identified by a Massachusetts group. Children born without two copies of the gene develop cancer of the retina.
However, work by Lee and others since then has led researchers to believe that its absence is also responsible for certain families being prone to breast cancer and prostate cancer, among others.
Texas officials will not talk in detail about the salary offered to Lee to relocate. (His salary at UCSD is $105,210 for the 1990-91 academic year.)
However, they did set before him an attractive and unusual package of research space, equipment and scientific freedom. The San Antonio campus had twice before tried to recruit Lee, but without the lures that the institute position will offer.
“His mandate is excellent science. And the prescription for that is one that he will write,” said Dr. John P. Howe III, president of the health science center.
Howe said Lee will have free rein to decide:
* His arrival date at his new job.
* What research interests he and other scientists at the institute will pursue.
* How to spend $5 million in equipment money the state is giving the institute, and how to allocate the lab space in a 60,000-square-foot building, at least a third of which would be occupied by Lee and his staff. By contrast, Lee now has about 2,500 square feet at UCSD.
* How many members of his research team can go with him to San Antonio and at what academic level, with the university picking up the costs. Among an estimated 25 people who will leave UCSD for the institute is his wife, Eva Lee, a biochemist and scientific collaborator.
Dr. David Bailey, chairman of the UCSD pathology department that Lee is leaving, was surprised Friday when told that Lee had accepted the Texas job. To his knowledge, he said, there was no opportunity for UCSD to make a counteroffer to keep the Lees in San Diego.
“Had we known that he was going for certain, there certainly would have been serious discussions,” Bailey said. “I deeply regret their going. It’s a tremendous loss, not only for the School of Medicine but for the University of California in general.”
Lee was out of town and could not be reached for comment.
Two previous times, Lee turned down a job at the San Antonio campus after UCSD officials made concessions. The most recent time, about a year ago, he was given about a third more lab space, Bailey said.
“This particular time I was unaware that the discussions were as serious as they obviously seem to have been, so we did not have the opportunity to do that,” Bailey said.
On the other hand, even with a new science building being built at UCSD, UCSD’s facilities clearly would not be as spacious as the new San Antonio institute’s building. At San Antonio, Lee’s group of about 2 dozen will be at most a third of the total research staff--giving them at least 20,000 square feet of space, nearly 10 times what they have at UCSD.
Bailey said the loss is an example of how difficult it is for public institutions to compete against privately financed efforts. The San Antonio institute’s building was built with $20 million in donated money, including part of a $15-million grant given by Texas entrepreneur Ross Perot.
Still, UCSD is not innocent of conducting its own privately financed academic raids. In March, for instance, it used drug-company money to create an Institute on Aging and recruit a leading researcher at Scripps Clinic, Dr. Dennis Carson, to move there.
In San Antonio, the new biotechnology institute is a key element in an economic development plan conceived during the Texas oil bust of 1984.
The institute will be situated on 50 acres in the rolling hills west of San Antonio, around which will be built the Texas Research Park. Under a nonprofit board, the research park will seek biotech tenants and help spin off new companies from the research conducted at the institute.
Howe attributes Lee’s acceptance of the position to his recognition that he will be building a research center from the ground up.
“At how many universities in the ‘90s do you have the opportunity to do that?” Howe said.
Lee was offered the job after an extensive interview and recruitment process over the past two years. He won the job over Dr. Ralph Arlinghaus of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Howe noted that a search committee and leading medical researchers agreed on Lee’s outstanding credentials as a scientist. Among them was Dr. Joseph Goldstein, who won a Nobel Prize for his research on atherosclerosis.
“It was Joe who sat in my office a year ago and said, ‘Wen-Hwa Lee is a very special person in American science, and it would be tremendous if he were to come to Texas,” Howe said. “So, over the past year, there’s just been lots of excitement about attracting him here.”
Lee and his wife, who received their doctorates at UC Berkeley, are natives of Taiwan. They have two children.
