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: “”https://pub.ucsf.edu/missionbay/faq/“>[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)

Shuttle managers have set tomorrow at 12:39 EDT as the new launch date for STS 115. This time, things are looking a little better: there’s only a small chance of thunderstorms and no tropical storms or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Still, the Air Force weather folks, who do forecasting for launch days, say that lift off isn’t a sure thing. Strict launch weather conditions mean that puffy cumulous clouds may be enough to force a scrub, and there is a chance of scattered showers at the Shuttle Landing Facility a few kilometres from the launch site. The bottom line is that the shuttle has only a 70% chance of getting off the ground tomorrow.

I’m headed back this afternoon, and I’ll write more when I arrive.