t h e s t a n f o r d c h a l l e n g e . s t a n f o r d . e d u

As a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, Rick Sapp, ’78, is no stranger to high-risk ventures. So when he learned about Bio-X, Stanford’s pioneering interdisciplinary program that provides seed funding to high-risk science, he followed it with keen interest. He can’t cure Parkinson’s or cerebral palsy, but he hopes to provide financial resources to someone who can.

Recently, he and his wife, Shari, endowed the Sapp Family Provostial Professorship. With Stanford’s 1:1 matching funds for provostial professorships—which can support faculty whose appointments bridge multiple departments or institutes—it became an instant return on investment. The first holder is Professor Carla Shatz, director of Bio-X.

A Pioneer at the HelmWho better to wrangle a pioneering program than a pioneer herself? Shatz was the first woman to get a PhD in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, the first woman to get tenure in a basic science department at Stanford School of Medicine, and only the second woman to chair a basic science department at Harvard Medical School. Most recently, she was elected to the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific honor societies in the world (Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin were members).

“I view her as extraordinary,” says Rick Sapp. “She went into an area that wasn’t populated with role models and carved out a substantial presence.”

Shatz started her career as a professor at Stanford, where she taught and researched from 1978 to 1991, until the University of California, Berkeley and later Harvard lured her away. In 2007, Stanford recruited Shatz to return and chair Bio-X. She jumped at the chance.

Established in 1998, the Bio-X program draws together clinicians, biologists, engineers, physicists, and computer scientists. Stanford was among the first to combine this range of expertise, because unlocking the secrets of the human body requires a break from business as usual.

“My job coming back here was to assess how Bio-X had evolved,” says Shatz. Her leadership has since elevated Bio-X to new heights.

She describes the program as akin to Noah’s Ark: you bring researchers, two by two, from different fields into one building, the James H. Clark Center. By last count, more

Issue 1 n Volume 11 n Summer 2011

A New Kind of Professorship to Lead a New Kind of Science

ABOVE: Carla Shatz, the Sapp Family Provostial Professor, says it took her “maybe a few milliseconds to decide” to accept the position as the director of Stanford’s Bio-X program. PHOTO: Lee Abel

LEFT: Investors in biosciences: Donors Rick, ’78, and Shari Sapp.

than 480 faculty members and more than 4,000 postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates from 63 departments are involved. Bio-X includes a seed grant-making program, the Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program (IIP), that has so far awarded $16 million to 113 projects.

Stacking the OddsAs philanthropists investing in a better future, the Sapps predict that biosciences will be to the 2010s what computer science was to the 1970s and the Internet was to the 1990s.

“You never know where the breakthrough is going to come,” says Rick, who serves on the university’s Board of Trustees and the alumni association’s Board of Directors. “But you feel better if you have Stanford working on those things, because it’s got to improve the odds.”

Shari says the interdisciplinary model resonated deeply with her. When they lived in London, she watched their children learn in leaps and bounds through interdisciplinary coursework at international schools. In education, as in research, she says, studying across disciplines creates scholars who can tackle the problems of our day.

Bio-X research is right on the cutting edge, and so it involves high risk and high reward. The seed grants—an average of $150,000 over two or three years—go to promising, experimental projects that cannot yet secure traditional funding from sources like the National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation. But that changes fast. Projects funded by the first four rounds of grants (about $12 million in total) have gone on to attract more than $150 million from outside funding; this is more than 10 times the initial investment.

There have been amazing successes: From a method of manipulating stem cells with magnets that could one day ease symptoms of cerebral palsy, to new brain-computer interfaces that allow paralyzed patients to move prosthetic arms and computer cursors just by thinking about it.

If you tell Shatz that sounds like science fiction, she’ll smile. “What you would consider today to be

science fiction, we know tomorrow is going to be science and medicine reality,” she says. n

For more information on Bio-X milestones, see timeline on page 2.

PHOTO: Courtesy of the Sapps

Renowned Art Collection Comes to StanfordBreaking news: Stanford will receive the core of one of the world’s most outstanding private collections of 20th-century American art. The Anderson Collection at Stanford, a gift from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence (center), features 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Learn more at news.stanford.edu and in the next Stanford Benefactor.

PHOTO: L. A. Cicero