Jesus Gonzales, an apprentice electrician, installs lighting in one of the labs of the BIO5 Institute building, one of two advanced design structures due to open soon at the University of Arizona. The building is designed with flexibility in mind, so working areas can be expanded or contracted to accommodate research.

Lindsay A. Miller / Arizona Daily Star

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It's a lot to ask of two new buildings.

Expectations for the University of Arizona's two newest buildings go far beyond the usual goals of attractive, functional shelter coming in under budget.

Administrators and advocates designed them to change the world. Both will be formally dedicated Dec. 1.

Peppered with attractively decorated meeting rooms of various sizes, for everything from one-on-one chats over coffee to conference room-sized brainstorming sessions, the emphasis is on drawing researchers of different disciplines together.

Even their labs are nothing like the windowless, fluorescent-lit, locked-door science tombs of the past. There are windows, natural light and modern colors nearly everywhere.

The UA BIO5 Institute's Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building and the UA College of Medicine's Medical Research Building were designed to encourage collaboration among scientists from the many different UA colleges, departments and disciplines who will create life-saving therapies, cure diseases and maybe even help feed the world, say Vicki Chandler and Keith Joiner.

Chandler is director of the BIO5 Institute, a UA group that draws about 150 scientists from a number of UA colleges — science, agriculture, medicine, engineering, optical science — and many departments. She's a researcher best known for her work in gene regulation, using corn to understand the mechanisms plants and animals use to turn genes on and off.

Joiner, dean of the College of Medicine, was at Yale University before being hired by the UA in March 2004.

"There's really nothing better than good space," says Joiner, sitting at a table in a glass-walled lobby of the Medical Research Building.

And, in the case of the $44 million-College of Medicine's Medical Research Building, that space is organized so as to dedicate each floor to a different disease: Cancer, which Joiner calls the UA's "crown jewel" of medical research; neuroscience; cardiovascular and diabetes — "we have an obligation with diabetes; it's almost synonymous with Arizona."

Keating and the MRB, as they're known, cover most of a square block on the northeast corner of East Helen Street and North Cherry Avenue, north of Speedway.

The two buildings — designed by the Los Angeles architecture firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership — are joined by enclosed walkways and an inverted white metal frame that soars over their shared courtyard.

Over in Keating, offices and meeting spaces on the north side and laboratories on the east and south walls, the idea is flexibility. The rows of parallel slate lab tables, perpendicular to the soaring windows, are on wheels.

Except for the top floor, where security is tight because of biological agents that will be stored and used there, access from one area to the next is as open as a library.

The $61.5 million BIO5 Institute's building is named for Thomas Keating, a self-confessed former "party frat boy" while a UA student 1960s. He returned and finished his degree in 2000 at the UA after building his family's security company. Keating donated $10 million to the project.

 To be assigned lab space in Keating, researchers must have what Chandler calls "the collaboration gene." She says they were chosen for the ability to work with others and for doing the kind of research Chandler says administrators wanted to encourage.

Chandler doesn't pull any punches when describing another virtue of this flexible space.

It can be quickly reconfigured for a new scientist should the present occupant fall idle or not bring in the grant money that fuels university-based research.

"If someone gets inactive," Chandler says of the traditional isolated individual lab, "it's a long slow process getting that space for another use. Here, if you need more space you can expand, and contract — if someone stops" producing.

She says 40 percent of the workers in this building will be students — 15 percent undergrads and 25 percent grad students. Undergrads will get a chance to work on real-world, cutting edge research, says Chandler. She says it's been a draw for both students and top-notch scientists.

"Really, the reason I came to Arizona was BIO5," says Felicia Goodrum, a virologist recruited to the UA from Princeton six months ago.

Goodrum, 37, says scientists by nature are social, not the secretive loners she expected when she was an undergrad.

"It's hard to do science in a vacuum," says Goodrum. "That's the great thing about academic scientists. They do have their own thing, but they do have overlapping interests and far-reaching curiosity. We all have an interest in serving public health. You create very close networks of colleagues and associates. It's the way science gets done. Instead of thinking of them as those eccentric people in goggles in labs, think of (them) in coffee shops writing on napkins."

For Stuart Williams, another former Yale scientist but a 16-year veteran UA biomedical engineering researcher with a maze of cross campus connections, BIO5 is a natural.

A professor and chairman of biomedical engineering appointed to Arizona Research Laboratories, Williams can be found anywhere from one of several laboratories across campus to operating rooms at University Medical Center.

Among his patents are methods for constructing new blood vessels and a way to encourage the growth of new tissue to replace damaged heart muscle.

Ultimately, Chandler says, she'll have to answer the question of whether the plan works.

"The more ways that we can show this new paradigm works and gives more of a bang than the sum of the parts the better. I'm under a fairly strong magnifying glass from administrators and the Board of Regents. I don't mean that negatively (but) it's new state money. We do have to document our return on investment.

"This experiment of open labs, really mixing people together, I'm not the least bit worried that it's not going to work."

On StarNet Read more science-related news at azstarnet. com/science