It's a rare life science company these days that isn't talking about integration, collaboration and the convergence of different technologies and disciplines as key to its future. Such key research areas as bioinformatics, for example, are often hybrids of molecular biology and computer science. Yet the fact is that the industry pulls what are arguably its most valuable assets -- Ph.D. scientists -- from a world that exalts specialization. “All the forces in the universities and the federal government have worked to reward those who pursue a single discipline," notes Kenneth Shine, president of the Institute of Medicine in Washington, DC. But that flouts the trends: “The most important developments in the life sciences over the next decade will likely occur at what we call the interface between disciplines,” Shine believes.

Indeed, according to Shine and others, the heat is on for academia to educate students to work at these interfaces. Currently, most academic institutions are addressing this reality with piecemeal programs at the margins of medicine, engineering and biology that try to buttress a graduate student's understanding fairly late in his or her academic development. Companies, meanwhile, are resorting to crash courses like "biology boot camps" for computer scientists. But at least one new graduate program is starting from scratch to design a degree whose goal is to more realistically prepare students for careers in life science. Backed by a $50 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, next year the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences in Claremont, Calif. will begin enrolling students with undergraduate training in engineering, biology and other pre-med majors.

The goal is a two-year M.S. degree that is not a consolation prize for a failed Ph.D. but rather an end in itself -- a “professional practice” degree. KGI’s new president, Henry E. Riggs, who's leaving a post as president of Harvey Mudd College at Claremont to run KGI, makes no apologies for tailoring this program tightly to industry's needs. KGI graduates, he hopes, will have “a practical understanding of the results-oriented, collaborative culture” of the workplace.

A new model?

That practical approach is music to industry's ears. Kwang-I Yu, president and CEO of Pasadena, Calif.-based Paracel, which makes genomic data analysis hardware and software, explains that his field of bioinformatics faces an acute shortage of job candidates with both biology and computer science backgrounds. Paracel routinely sends its newly hired computer scientists to biology boot camp while coaxing its biologists to learn computer programming. “It would be pretty nice if there were institutions that did this training for us,” says Yu. And that's why he jumped at the chance to serve on KGI's advisory council. “I think (KGI) represents the future,” he says.

If it succeeds in its mission, KGI could create a new model for other graduate programs to emulate, according to Shine. That may explain why Riggs has attracted an impressive advisory council, including Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and Joseph Bordogna, acting deputy director of the National Science Foundation, among others.

KGI, launched in March of 1997, is the seventh member of the Claremont Consortium of Colleges, which includes five undergraduate and two graduate institutions. Over a five-year period, the institute hopes to reach an enrollment of 125 students, about 75 percent of whom will be M.S. candidates. Initially, KGI will focus its resources on three “core competencies,” bioinformatics, bioinstrumentation and biochemical process engineering. Industry internships will be an integral part of the Keck curriculum, as will courses in management, ethics, economics and policy issues.

One of the only graduate degree programs comparable to KGI’s is the Evanston, Ill.-based Center for Biotechnology at Northwestern University, which has awarded 150 M.S. degrees since its inception in 1993. Students select one of five areas to specialize in, including cell biology/immunology, genomics/genetic engineering, bioengineering, medicinal chemistry and bioinformatics. Director Alicia Löffler said graduates have been employed by companies such as Amgen Inc., Immunex Corp., CellPro Inc., G.D. Searle and Wyeth-Ayerst, to name a few. Although Keck plans to provide some traditional business management training, Northwestern’s program is more overtly linked to the top-tier M.B.A. program at the Kellogg School of Management. “The management of innovation has become very important,” Löffler said. “The most common error of an M.B.A. with no science background is to overestimate the powers of the science. For biotechnology companies, the accurate assessment of technology is critical.”

Promoting breadth, fighting mediocrity

KGI and Northwestern are not alone in their efforts to produce scientists who can speak the language of business and vice versa. Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management offers an accelerated M.B.A. option for scientists, engineers and others with advanced scientific or technical degrees and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science offers an ExMSE (Executive Master of Science in Engineering), a part-time program to train engineers and scientists for management positions in technology-based organizations.

Critics of these new trends in graduate education argue that “cross-disciplinary” could become a synonym for mediocrity. “Historically, academics have looked down upon those who work at the interface between different disciplines,” concedes Shine. Riggs says the so-called mediocrity argument implies that “the way we have defined disciplines in the past is the only way to define them, and that seems to me a somewhat parochial view.”

Riggs, who has worked in industry and also once chaired Stanford University's industrial engineering department, is the first to admit that there are dangers inherent in bringing industry and academia closer together in designing a curriculum. “I do think one must be careful that the curriculum is not dictated by industry, but rather informed by input from industry,” he says. “The fear is that industry tends to take a short-term view of things whereas we must take a long-term view.”

For the biotechnology industry, there's another peculiar reality that could limit the appeal of the KGI approach: Biotechnology companies often use the raw number of Ph.D.s on their staffs as an early measure of both competence and potential and an asset for fund-raising. Despite the need for cross-disciplinary skills, will an M.S. from KGI adequately balance the loss of a Ph.D. in a column total in an IPO prospectus? Riggs says he has talked with more than 70 companies over the past two years, and the answer is yes. “Even companies that are absolutely stuffed full of Ph.D.s say they are really interested in people with this type of training,” he says. Robert Curry, another KGI advisory council member and a general partner at The Sprout Group, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm, agrees that cross-disciplinary skills are so critical today that small companies find they "either develop and culture these people in-house or steal them from other organizations.”

--Lisa Piercey

originally published 04/09/1998