The Sciences
Science Hill Tackles the Big Questions
Yale must contribute to the wave of discovery now shaping the world—a challenge felt not just in a few selected programs, but across our campus. By expanding our faculty, launching new research, and building new facilities, Yale can extend the reach of Science Hill, the ideas born there, and the graduates who carry them into society.
Pursuing knowledge for its own sake
Meg Urry’s telescope is dominated by mid-sized galaxies—and she wants to know why. “Our universe,” she says, “doesn’t have to be the way it is.” Indeed, since the Big Bang, there has been time enough for supersized galaxies to form, but astronomers see none. Likewise, few very small galaxies are found in the cosmos. “There are forces and processes that have led to particular structures,” says Urry, “and we are just beginning to understand how they operate.”
Urry’s work is science at its most basic—exploring how the universe works and proposing models of how it came to be. Her motive is pure human curiosity.
Urry studies supermassive black holes, immense objects now thought to exist at the center of most galaxies. Weighing millions of times more than the sun, they generate radiation and gravitational fields powerful enough to influence space on a galactic scale. Says Urry, “We don’t fully understand their origins, but we strongly suspect that black holes affect how galaxies form.” With detailed study, she hopes to find clues that explain the formation of the universe.
Exploring new frontiers
Marvin Chun shares Urry’s fascination with the unknown, but his frontier is the human brain. A psychologist, Chun uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity as memories are formed. Knowing that people consciously perceive and remember only a fraction of what they see, he focuses on brain states associated with remembering—or not remembering—an image.
In one experiment, subjects view hundreds of composite images that present a face and a scene at the same time. Says Chun, “The brain processes faces and scenes in two distinct locations. If we ask the subject to focus only on the faces, for example, we can measure the brain activity that type of image stimulates.”
Chun expected that as a person attends to a face, activity would rise in the region concerned with faces. Surprisingly, the region concerned with scenes is active too, though the subject has no awareness of it. Focused on the face, the subject may form a memory of that face, but not of the scene it overlaps. “We’ve also learned,” says Chun, “that once you’ve formed a memory of an image, your brain devotes less activity to that image the next time you see it. I can actually tell if you remember a face based on the level of activity it stimulates in your brain.” Chun believes that a fundamental knowledge of memory formation can lead to treatments for disorders like Alzheimer’s.
A novel path to energy production
Gary Brudvig is concerned with energy production. As a chemist, he envies nature’s ability to convert light into useful energy. “With photosynthesis, nature has solved a very tricky problem,” explains Brudvig, “essentially, how to split water molecules into dioxygen and release sugars that can be burned as fuel. We’re probing at a very basic level to understand how that works, and we’re experimenting with ways to mimic photosynthesis in the lab.” In time, Brudvig envisions a new method for solar energy conversion that is efficient and plentiful enough to compete with fossil fuels.
“Nature is telling us how to engineer an alternative energy source,” he says. “If we’re smart enough, we can fuel our economy without releasing the greenhouse gases that lead to climate change.”
Looking back to understand climate change
Derek Briggs, a geologist and director of the Institute of Biospheric Studies, looks at another side of this issue—how climate change impacts the environment. “We need to know how ecosystems react to climate change,” he says. “To predict the future, we’re investigating climate events of the past.”
With a team of scientists from Vanderbilt, the New York Institute of Technology, and the University of Wisconsin, Briggs is reconstructing a picture of life during the Permian-Triassic, a period of mass extinction some 250 million years ago. “The Allan Hills in Victoria Land, Antarctica, preserve sediment layers from the Pangaean supercontinent,” Briggs explains, “so excavations there tell us what a higher-latitude ecosystem looked like, and how it was changed by global warming.” His specialty—teasing out traces of soft tissue in the fossil record—helps the team catalogue plants and animals that inhabited the forests and lakes of this once-warm region. “Our findings add to a basic understanding of climate change and help scientists refine their climate models,” he says.
People like Urry, Chun, Brudvig, and Briggs are central to basic science. To bring them here, Yale needs sophisticated facilities, state-of-the-art tools, and resources to support innovation. Perhaps most important is a critical mass of other scholars—faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students—engaged in pathbreaking research.
Yale Tomorrow seeks new endowment for professorships, fellowships, and research support in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and special centers like the Peabody Museum and the Institute for Biospheric Studies. No less important are funds to upgrade Yale’s science facilities. A multiphase building program is improving our laboratories, but this effort is not complete. Construction is under way for a new home for Forestry & Environmental Studies, and we will soon break ground on a biological science facility. Sterling Chemistry is slated for renovation and potential conversion to a center for undergraduate science, and the Peabody is under consideration for a top-to-bottom renovation.
