Genetics department gets new home

Published: Thursday, October 29, 1998

Thursday, October 29, 1998

GENETICS: Completed building lets researchers interact to forge path to future of modern medicine

By Matt Grace

Daily Bruin Contributor

Inside the brick-red Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center a new face on the row of medical buildings along Westwood the future of modern medicine is moving in.

The center will be the new home for the department of human genetics and part of the Brain Research Institute. It promises to lead UCLA into the forefront of genetics, a field of science that will soon become a part of everyday health care.

"I think the center of human genetics has already made UCLA a major player in the scene of human genetics," said Gerald Levey, dean of the UCLA Medical School. "And I don't think one could be a major research institution without having a world-class genetics program."

"It will be critical for medicine of the 21st century to have the knowledge of what (genes) do and what happens if a gene is mutated or deleted, and what role it plays on human disease," Levey said.

This knowledge will be the foundation behind preventing diseases from occurring, rather than waiting to treat a disease in response to symptoms.

So once UCLA received the $45 million donation from the Gonda family, it had the resources to create a center that will soon be at the forefront of international genetics research an endeavor which requires an internationally renowned scientist.

Leena Peltonen, an expert in the genetics of human diseases, was wooed away from the University of Helsinki in Finland after UCLA offered the chance to lead their new department into the 21st century.

"Genetics is essentially the future of medicine," Peltonen said. With the state-of-the-art laboratories and a department filled with talented researchers, she couldn't resist.

"That's a major temptation and challenge that you can create something new," Peltonen said, who now holds the chair of the new department of human genetics.

At UCLA, neuroscience is the single biggest scholarly discipline, drawing faculty from the school of dentistry, the school of engineering, the school of medicine and the College of Letters & Science.

The Gonda family donation has enabled UCLA to build the center and establish a department of genetics which includes both the Brain Research Institute and department of genetics, said Allan Tobin, director of BRI.

Although not everyone within the department of human genetics will be housed in the new building, the center will allow scientists to slide from discipline to discipline.

Susan Smalley, a human geneticist and professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, for one, studies behavioral disorders that begin in childhood, such as autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, on a genetic level.

The center will give her "the molecular tools to uncover susceptible genes for complex traits, such as human behavior. Understanding of complex behavior is something we can do now because of the Human Genome Project," she said.

"It will enable us to uncover all the genes that contribute to behavior."

The design of the building itself also promotes interaction. There are open labs, "interactive zones" and a cafe available for planned and unplanned meetings opportunities for geneticists and neuroscientists to have meaningful discussions and play with new ideas.

"The virtue of this building is its interactiveness," Tobin said. "We are concentrating our efforts to foster interaction on three dimensions," and bringing together "perspectives from people who are coming at neuroscience at different angles."

The center will focus on the genetic composition of brain function and diseases; learning and memory on a cellular and molecular level; and how genetics and cell biology shape the these abilities.

"The main thing that we look forward to being able to do is examine the patterns of inheritance and expression, not just for a few genes, but for thousands of genes at a time," Tobin said.

"We think that it will allow us to understand cellular changes in learning and memory on the one hand" Tobin said, "and disease pathology on the other."

"It will have an impact on the way we teach genetics and the way we do research."

PATIL ARMENIAN

Dr. Leena Peltonen is the new director of the UCLA human genetics program.

Comments, feedback, problems?