After the morning session, I jumped in a cab and went to UCSF's Mission Bay campus - it's a 43-acre campus that was acquired at no cost to the university and contains a number of laboratories, centers, and research institutes. It's quite large and is getting bigger: "[a]bout 1,700 faculty, students, scholars and staff already work in the new UCSF Mission Bay campus community. At full build-out, 9,100 people are expected to work and study at the new campus."

I had a meeting with a professor in Genentech Hall, a 434,000 square foot building where many of the chemical biologists work (there are also a number of structural, molecular, and developmental biologists in the building).

It truly is a beautiful building, and the entire campus looks like it'd be a great place to work - none of the grey/dirty walls and strange odors found in older chemistry/biochemistry bulidings... I'd highly recommend checking out the campus next time you're in San Francisco - but security is pretty tight, so you might want to sign up for the tour. In the meantime, click here for the virtual tour...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)