In 16Th- and 17Th-Century Europe, There Was No Clear Distinction Between Libraries and Museums Or Between Archives and Treasuries

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Neuro-X: in your head: Thinking global: Human Health: The Neuroscience New imaging technology American studies, Dean Ann Arvin Institute has an is allowing physicians an interdisciplinary outlines the ambitious program and researchers to undergraduate university’s that brings together make a quantum leap in program, is making translational vision researchers from many their efforts to decipher sure students take a for health research disciplines, page 4 the brain, page 4 broad view, page 6 at Stanford, page 8

ISSUE 7 • FALL 2007 • STANFORD UNIVERSITY • MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu

In 16th- and 17th-century Europe, there was no clear distinction between libraries and museums or between archives and treasuries. Such places, filled with books, natural oddities, relics, beautiful objects, manuscripts, stones and bones, could resemble junk rooms for the erudite, wunderkammern, landing spots for bequests of all sorts. Books were organized by size or date of arrival or donor, not by content or use. See story, page 2

PHOTO: CONNIE SHAO MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu Virtually unlimited knowledge n 16th- and 17th-century Europe, there was pening in the way knowledge is being delivered.” no clear distinction between libraries and In the years following the 1989 Loma Prieta earth- museums or between archives and treasuries. quake, the people involved in the remodeling of Green ‘I’m expecting 9 million Such places, filled with books, natural oddi- Library sometimes worried that their efforts might be ties, relics, beautiful objects, manuscripts, misdirected, given the advent of the much-discussed books incoming, so the stones and bones, could resemble junk rooms bookless library. It didn’t turn out that way. for the erudite, Wunderkammern, landing Henry Lowood, curator for the Germanic, history magnitude of my informatic spots for bequests of all sorts. Books were of science and technology, and film and media collec- organized by size or date of arrival or donor, not by tions, was on the staff at that time. “The doomsday contentI or use. projections didn’t carry weight at a place like Stanford challenges is going Slowly, systematic disciplinary and alphabetical because we’re able to acquire the new while maintain- up dramatically,’ catalogs emerged, and “libraries” became places that ing the old,” he said. stored books and manuscripts—and little else. Gerhard Casper, who came to Stanford as university Keller said. Today, one doesn’t trip over skeletons or jewel boxes. president in 1992, had decided that the library would But libraries—or cybraries, as University Librarian Mi- be rebuilt, and Keller, who arrived in 1993, could take chael Keller likes to call them—contain the world. Ab- into account the swift technological advances since the solutely everything is there. The age of the collection earthquake. has returned. “My whole career is littered with cases of trying to L.A. CICERO “The virtual makes figure out what people want in libraries,” said Keller. that possible,” said As- “Strategic thinking is part of my toolkit. What do you sunta Pisani, associate do with a great old building when you have the oppor- university librarian for tunity to rebuild?” collections and ser- The redesign of Green Library called for a variety vices. “One of the old of spaces to account for the new variety of uses and limitations of librar- resources: quiet, noisy, computing, group, individual, ies was space. There closed, open. Resource centers for humanities and so- were beautiful rooms cial sciences were created. with displays, which “We returned all the big spaces to their original, we then became larger tore out all the foolishness that was constructed from and more organized, 1919 to 1989, and with all those walls wide open, we and decisions had to be installed lots of conduit for powerful signal,” he said. made about space and Casper, at the dedication ceremony for the opening efficiency. But now it of the Bing Wing in 1999, remarked that the gaping doesn’t matter.” holes at the construction site had reminded him of the The relationship be- bombed-out buildings of his Hamburg childhood. At tween hyperlinks and no point, he said—his talk was titled “Who Needs a 17th-century collecting Library Anyway?”—did he or anyone else seriously en- practices might not be tertain a libraryless future. obvious. But the chief virtue of digitization, from the point of view Subject specialists Art librarian Peter Blank and Amber Ruiz, of Keller and his colleagues, is that you can dig deep— Curators, or subject specialists, such as Lowood, really, really deep. You can drill through a text to find who have advanced degrees, are up to date on the de- curator of the Visual Resources Center. the point at which child psychology veers into electri- bates in their disciplines and on what is going on in the The center is embarked upon a campaign cal engineering, the moment of the genesis of scientific information trade, formerly known as the book trade. arguments within philosophy, the places where biology “What’s accessible and interesting that we can ac- to reach out to the broader Stanford com- bumps up against chemistry and physics, where relics quire in order to make Stanford a distinctive place for and stones and texts can be viewed as part of a whole. musicologists or early childhood education experts or munity. Below, University Librarian Michael Informatics, which posits that everything ultimately mechanical engineers?” Keller asked. Keller. Bottom, a robotic page-turning is linked to everything else, now can actually link most “The subject specialists understand how their disci- everything through taxonomic indexing, a highly com- plines interact and challenge one another, so this whole and scanning device, the centerpiece of plex process of assigning semantic categories to clumps sense of multidisciplinarity is reflected in how we build collections. SULAIR’s array of on-campus digitization of text that then can be summoned in a certain, relevant order, relying on what Keller calls the text’s fin- “Librarians have always been multidisciplinary, up capabilities. gerprint. With that, instead of running through the on all the big strategic innovations. We collect in all stacks from Spanish history (DP, second floor) to so- fields, we identify all subjects, we develop new tech- cial history (HN, way down in the basement) and then niques afforded by digital versions, we provide the L.A. CICERO over to the Law Library or up into the Bing Wing to means to analyze works by subjects, we make correla- find Jewish law (KBM) and then back up to Green to tions ... we’re it.” check Spanish lyric poetry (PQ, third floor), it’s all in Pisani also pointed to the range of the activities of one place. Or it will be soon. Stanford’s 35 subject specialists. “I’m expecting 9 million books incoming, so the “We’re farsighted,” she said. “Some libraries have magnitude of my informatic challenges is going up dra- created separate organizations to acquire electronic con- matically,” said Keller, obviously delighted to have such tent. Here we believe that content and knowledge are problems, largely the result of Stanford’s collaboration fundamental to a good collection development program with Google. regardless of how the information is being delivered.” Lowood, for example, said he will choose (or at least participate in the choice of) German materials through- Disciplines fused out the collections, from ancient to high-tech, which he In Keller’s view, there’s an old narrative and a new said “encourages a sort of interdisciplinarity.” narrative. The old one is a ribbon of text, a stream of Though libraries today are no longer simply the sum characters organized from beginning to end. The new of whatever arrives at their doorstep, they still seek and narrative is the old narrative with interruptions, with receive collections. Among Stanford’s outstanding spe- high-octane Java, with links and spreadsheets and vid- cial collections are the papers of Buckminster Fuller, eos and citations and whatever else will help the reader Allen Ginsberg and John Steinbeck; an important se- STUART SNYDMAN make connections. ries of 18th-century French political economy pam- Keller started off his professional life as a music li- phlets; the records of the Farm Worker Archive and the brarian. So how did he get from there to book robots, National Council of La Raza; and a wonderful collec- to the pioneering HighWire Press (online home to more tion of artifacts and papers documenting the history of than 1,000 journals) and to cybraries? Silicon Valley. “It’s the training,” he said. “You study physics, And the special collections are not necessarily all in physiology, mechanical engineering, the creative pro- the department of Special Collections. The Archive of cess. You read code, psychology, history, reception, Recorded Sound, hidden downstairs in the Music Li- patronage. We cover the whole waterfront. That’s the brary, is the repository for some 300,000 recordings perspective we bring to the party.” (including thousands of 78 rpm records), the entire “Libraries are participating in a fusing of disci- recordings of the Monterey Jazz Festival, remarkable plines,” Pisani said. “We are acquiring packages of contraptions from more than a century ago that actu- publications or information now, not just traditional ally produce fine music, radio news shows from World acquisitions. War II recorded on heavy 16-inch discs, voices of the “The Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Con- most prominent poets of the 1950s and all the KZSU gress assigns books to a specific place, and once there, tracks from the 1960s, among other treasures. the book doesn’t belong anywhere else. That’s being Special Collections used to be a sort of sanctuary, undone with digital. Before, I’d know where to browse Pisani said, but over the past decade more and more in the stacks for a specific topic, but, by the same to- students have been making use of its holdings. The sub- ken, I’d miss books with different call numbers. ject librarians have close ties to their disciplinary coun- “That’s all changing. The order is gone. There is a terparts in academic departments, who in turn use the new kind of order. Something really important is hap- library holdings as anchors for their classes. 2 FALL 2007 MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu

L.A. CICERO

When Blank says the library was “inward-looking,” he is referring to its origins along the lines of a traditional museum research library. Under- graduates couldn’t get in at all; graduate students could not check out books; and faculty members had limited privileges. That all has changed, and the library now circulates materials to the entire Stanford community.

Six-inch lean Blank envisions the art library as a “laboratory space to support a discovery environment,” a place with foot traffic, viewing technology and rotating exhibits showing off an admirable collection of ephemera and art objects. “We’re trying to recreate the whole environment to encourage students to visit, personally or virtually, and make it more of a learning space, a place for doing things, where students can see and touch—for example—how art was used as a political tool in the 1960s and ’70s in China,” he said, referring to the library’s collection of Maoist posters, on display last year. “There’s something I call the ‘6-inch-lean,’ that moment when you’re showing students something and they move in just a bit to see the artifact better. Right then, they’re intellectually and corpo- rally engaged. That’s our job. That’s why students come to Stanford.” Blank emphasized that many of the objects in the art library that might appear to outsiders to be secondary materials, that is, documents about art objects, are, in fact, primary materials, art objects themselves. Photography books, for example, are in many cases the object, the first or the only site where a photograph ever appears. “In the ’60s and ’70s, the art practice site often was the magazine,” Blank said. “So it is essential to preserve that artifact in its original form. Same with Life magazine or posters. Those artifacts project their own media values. “Most libraries don’t realize they even have ephemera. There were lots of pamphlets published by conceptual artists and contemporary galleries in the 1960s in which pieces would be described or illustrated.” Such was the case with the work of British artist Richard Long, for example, who “makes sculpture by walking,” transforming his wanderings into the artifact itself. “So pamphlets were released as if they were catalogs, but in fact they were published docu- mentation of the art piece,” Blank said. “They’re here because they appeared as catalogs, when in fact they have multiple purposes. I’m constantly “We want them to be familiar with primary by definition, is flexible. Josephine said she’s look- finding stuff like that here and retrieving it.” sources,” Pisani said, “to really actually see a let- ing into ensuring a library presence there outside ter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.” the formal confines of the library—maybe just a desk or a terminal—something to let students Virtual and comfortable know that they can contact a reference librarian The physical site and contents of libraries have New libraries whenever or wherever they get stuck. thus not been overtaken by the virtual. They need Among all the buildings going up in the next Unlike the engineering library, the projected art each other. The Lane and Bender reading rooms in decade or so at Stanford will be at least two new and architecture library—one of the central pieces Green Library, with their overstuffed chairs, the libraries: engineering and art. The former is ex- of the university’s Arts Initiative—will have plenty interplay of natural and indoor lighting and the pected to be bookless within a decade or so. It of bookshelves. Many arts (and humanities) jour- generous wooden tables, are beacons. The grand will therefore have fewer non-professional staff nals are not available online, and reproduction of old spaces (and less grand seminar and group- members but more reference librarians to help images is not always reliable. study rooms) were retained or revived. Libraries, with digital resources. “The very nature of research in an object-based after all, are meeting places, the most obvious site Helen Josephine, head librarian of the Engi- discipline is inextricably linked to an object-based for cross-disciplinary communities to emerge. neering Library, said that traditionally librarians learning environment, where the form of the book A user survey in spring 2003 showed that stu- in her field would have purchased materials along or magazine as physical object is often as imbued dents place great value on the library as a place to departmental lines, asking, for example, what with cultural coding as its content,” said Peter study and that they rely upon reference librarians does mechanical engineering need? Blank, head librarian of the Art and Architecture to assist them with online resources. “But increasingly, those students and research Library. “There is no substitute for placing such Librarians, in turn, are using the Internet to are crossing disciplines, so they may be interested objects in students’ hands. We’re dealing with a bring in students and researchers. Branner Li- in the biological or medical applications of some- different kind of data here.” brary, for example, at the School of Earth Sci- thing in mechanical engineering,” she said. “So But clearly there is a limit to the number of art ences, features an informative and attractive blog the materials they need to frame their research objects an art library can have, and Blank and with information on books, journals, pollution and are no longer bound by mechanical engineering.” his staff are also deeply committed to making the earthquakes, updates on Geographic Information Thus various libraries end up coordinating their online Visual Resources Center (VRC), which Services (GIS) and a list of relevant del.icio.us tags, purchases and use. houses digital images and slides, accessible, useful a social-networking system for identifying useful “Suddenly the unobvious becomes obvious by and integral to departments across campus. bookmarks. The main Information Center webpage linking across disciplines,” she said. “One of our In 2006 the VRC was transferred from the Art also has tags, blogs, research Q&As and a host of design professors here says a good design is the and Art History Department to Stanford Uni- news items, all linked to appropriate resources. one where you look at it and you say, ‘Of course, versity Libraries and Academic Information Re- “What’s exciting is seeing the constant evolu- it’s so obvious!’ sources (SULAIR). tion and reinvention of the services and informa- “Using that thinking, we’re looking at the li- “SULAIR brought considerable technical sup- tion we can provide to people,” Josephine said. “I brary as a place for the intersection of all those port to VRC, as well as a different awareness of remember being an undergraduate at Doe Library ideas. So it’s not necessary that we have all the how visual materials can be used across disci- [at Berkeley] and being just awed by that huge objects of information here. We can point to it on- plines,” he said. “We’re refocusing a somewhat reading room full of card catalogs. It’s come full line and help students make it applicable for their inward-looking operation outward to make con- circle; we’re back to that awe-inspiring sense. research.” nections across the campus. Anyone on campus “I’m very jazzed; it’s very exciting. We have The new engineering library will be in a por- can log on to the ImageBase. We’re upgrading more of a feel that we can experiment with things tion of the School of Engineering Center that also equipment, systemizing backups and cleaning up and see what works. We don’t have to have every- contains a cafe and a “research gym,” space that, data. We’ve got an excellent team.” thing perfect.” FALL 2007 3 MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu Stanford’s latest brainchild

dding “neuro” to your research ogy, genetics, electrophysiology and biochemistry, in five of Stanford’s seven schools, teaching some appears to be a savvy move. among others. Cognitive neuroscience, which lies aspect of neuroscience. There’s neurotechnology and at the intersection of psychology and neurology, “The NIS has the broadest representation of neuroethics and neuroeconom- looks at the more ethereal, less physical aspects of any of the institutes of medicine,” he said. “Sci- ics and neurolaw. Pictures of the brain’s activity. entists from engineering, H&S and medicine the brain, it is said, can show This fall, classes about the brain are being given are all deeply involved in neuroscience research, us why we kill, why we like in about a dozen departments at the schools of and they all see problems from different points Bach, why we construct stories Engineering, Medicine, Education, and Humani- of view. Each feels strongly that their work is the way we do and why we choose the wrong boy- ties and Sciences. important, and each one advocates for more re- friends.A And very precise images of the brain hold sources to train more students. And they’re all out the promise of very precise tinkering. right. Articles about this phenomenon are in daily Translational mission “I’ve been at Stanford for 30 years, and the ex- newspapers and popular magazines and on web- One of five institutes at the School of Medicine, pectation here is that people get along and help sites. There are claims of mind-reading and self- NIS is in the midst of a campaign to realize its vi- each other. By and large, it works.” rewiring. The website Slate reported recently on sion of synthesizing molecules and mind, analysis The NIS plan calls for five clusters: the the year’s top five neuroscience achievements, and application, and science and society—essen- Program in Neural Circuit Control, devoted each with brilliant and horrifying applications. tially the translational vision of the medical school to the molecular and cellular basis for circuit Maybe it all started when George H. W. Bush in often repeated by Dean Philip Pizzo. Starting with formation, function and learning; the Cen- July 1990 proclaimed the next 10 years to be “the disease, this initiative—for the time being called ter for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imag- decade of the brain.” “Neuro-X”—will build outward, incorporating ing, where people from varied disciplines will Why has the brain become so popular? “Be- an ever-widening field of experts. work together on shared imaging instruments; cause people have realized they have one,” re- “We want to do things no department could the Center for the Mind, Brain and Computa- sponds William Mobley, founding director of do,” Mobley said last summer. “So we’re going tion, devoted to bridging the gap between the the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford (NIS). from science to medicine to society, and that’s theoretical and experimental sides of brain re- “They’ve realized that everything that matters is what it’s all about, that’s what it should be. No search; the Program for Translational Neuro- going on in the brain. And the how explains the department can do that. We’re creating a palette science, which will study malfunction and re- why: Why do I like this music and not that music? of many, many colors.” pair; and the Center on the Brain and Society, Why me?” Brian Wandell, another leader at NIS, and also which will emphasize neuroethics, education, That last question, common to most human co-chair of the Stanford Initiative on Human decision-making and law. beings, got Mobley, the John E. Cahill Family Health and current chair of the Department of In other words, from the microscopic to Professor in the School of Medicine, into neuro- Psychology, is similarly enthused about NIS and the societal. And one day, if Neuro-X leaders science to begin with. The field is an amalgam of the array of possibilities. There are nearly 80 fac- have their way, all these researchers will share neurology, molecular biology, cognitive psychol- ulty members, representing some 15 departments space.

your way up and down the scale. Using their condition. An entirely new perspective MRI, we’re working hard to link the nano RtfMRI is finally allowing medical and slices used in pathology to the larger engineering researchers to get close The human brain comprises 25 billion that will allow us to be even better.” images, a few millimeters wide, of whole to this intersection of subjectivity and neurons that communicate through more After the conversations that led to healthy people, creating an integrative physicality. or less 25 trillion specialized junctions “Neuro-X” (see accompanying article) imaging program to teach all those tech- Sean Mackey, co-director of the Pain called synapses. showed that imaging was a priority niques to students.” Working Group at NIS, said, “I knew in Try taking a picture of that. across the board, NIS launched a neuro- Real-time functional magnetic reso- grad school [studying electrical engineer- The explosion of interest in neurosci- modeling lab. nance imaging (rtfMRI) is being applied ing] that I was going into medicine. ence over the past decade “This lab should function to a host of neuroscientific problems. “This is a natural meld of medicine is due largely to advances as a crossroads, a watering Among them: the alleviation of chronic and high tech. I did early work in cardio, in imaging technology, which hole, a place for people to pain and the ability to make good or bad then anesthesia, then pain management. enables scientists to do their come together casually and decisions. I looked at what people were doing and I work and unites researchers share expertise and enjoy cof- said, wow, we’re in the dark ages. We’re from different areas who dis- fee and mingle, which we hope See your pain still fusing people’s backs! We’re giving cover they can all profit from will lead to a new curriculum Brian Knutson Pain is not just a medical condition; them the same drugs as 20 years ago! the same gadget. in computational neurosci- Stanford’s online Encyclopedia of Phi- So I got into imaging and systems neuro- “A vast amount of both invention and ence,” said Stephen Smith, a professor losophy devotes pages and pages of science and networking.” research involves being able to see stuff,” of molecular and cellular physiology at philosophical analysis to the subject. It is Most famously, Mackey’s group has said psychologist Brian Wandell, co-di- the School of Medicine who works on the both a biochemical and a profoundly sub- enabled people to literally see their pain rector of the Neuroscience Institute at brain’s synaptic circuitry. jective experience. A pain questionnaire as they are experiencing it while inside an Stanford (NIS) and chair of the Psychol- “Steve Smith and I image things at widely used by physicians offers patients MRI scanner. ogy Department. “Visualization is an enor- opposite ends of the size scale,” Wandell some 100 adjectives (pulsing, drilling, “I don’t want to sensationalize the mous help. Stanford has been a world said. Smith looks at lab samples; Wandell wrenching, scalding, taut, unbearable, clinical applications of this,” he cautioned. leader in this, but now we’re seeing ways looks at living humans. “You need to work nagging, torturing) to help them describe “We’re not selling snake oil. There’s lots Courtesy SEAN MACKEY of work ahead before we can envision a therapeutic tool.” But that said, who wouldn’t be excited by preliminary results that show that by seeing their pain, people to some extent can control it? The ethical pitfalls of such work, however, are legion. “Think about it,” Mackey said. “People are rewiring their own brains. You could

Patients in Sean Mackey’s laboratory – in this case, someone with chronic neck and arm pain – learn to control a specific region build up soldiers’ capacity to absorb of their brain as they watch real time fMRI feedback, with a resulting change in their pain. pain. You could improve memory so stu-

4 FALL 2007 MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu

L.A. CICERO Essential collaboration But until then, they have to walk from department to department, which has its own advan- tages. Mobley said, for example, that he has been speaking with researchers at the School of Educa- tion and the Graduate School of Business about collaborative projects on Down syndrome, his field of expertise. The groups working on autism and Parkinson’s disease call upon psychologists, biochemists, electrical engineers and physicists to better understand the workings of the brain; one such collaborator was Steve Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 and is now the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Labo- ratory. Mobley was instrumental in bringing the Da- lai Lama to Stanford in 2005, when the School of Medicine hosted a daylong dialogue among neuroscientists, Buddhist scholars and the community. The point was not to apply Buddhist philosophy to science or vice versa, he told the audience then, but to find those places where they overlapped and to find the common ground between two admittedly different cultures. “Neuroscientists think in terms of writing papers,” Mobley said, reflecting back on that encounter. “Scientists think they can measure everything; but I have an open mind—literally.” When he tried to set up what he calls the Com- passion Project, inspired by the Dalai Lama’s visit—“talk about collaboration!”—several col- Fumiko Hoeft, a senior research scientist, is especially interested in using fMRI technology in a clinical setting. leagues brushed him off, he said. But he knew it was the right thing to do, he said, and he is moving ahead. Such possibilities might promise liberation, but technology. But I think neuroscientists can pre- But along with compassion, some would argue they might also offer the means for ethical abuses vent abuses. If we have the tools, we’ll use them. there is also potential trouble; among the most and human rights violations. You can’t prevent tool-making. The most trans- talked-about neuroscientific developments are hu- “Sometimes I think we’re like atomic physi- formative thing in the world right now is neuro- man enhancement, cloning, genetic tinkering and cists in the 1920s,” Mobley said. “Within a few science. It will transform our world like nothing criminal verdicts without the bother of a trial. years, something is going to happen with this else.”

dents would score better on tests. You (though not real-time functional MRI, the Knutson, assistant professor of psychol- of Health, where he found a mentor who could alter the cognitive development of kind Mackey uses for his pain research) ogy. He is part of a new group of was interested in emotions. How to elicit autistic kids. These projects all have very for pre-surgical planning can finally be researchers called neuroeconomists— emotions? the mentor wondered. Money, significant ethical ramifications. That’s reimbursed by health insurance, which psychologists, economists and neurolo- Knutson replied. why we need smart people discussing she called very exciting news. gists who essentially investigate decision- “Technology finally caught up with me,” these things, and so far we’re doing very “So the cost has to come making. The results, they say, Knutson said, reflecting from his perch in basic science, with no application.” down,” she said. “Policy has can illuminate not only why the country’s top psychology department. Pain research at Stanford unites sci- to change in order for this to people make unwise invest- Psychologists, of course, are interest- entists, physicians and engineers, and be applied.” ments but also the origins of ed primarily in individual human beings, “the collaboration is fascinating,” Mackey At Stanford, there is a good certain mental health disor- not the aggregate, so Knutson’s col- said. “Pain has gotten so complex, it’s chance of planting the seeds ders, including addiction. (It is laboration with economists—like Brian

impossible for one person to understand of such change because pol- Brian Wandell a field not without controversy, Wandell’s with Steven Smith—is a case it all. Disparate fields are necessary, with icy and medical researchers with some economists alleg- of technology helping aligned disciplines everyone thinking outside the box, and often interact. ing that proponents misunderstand classi- answer similar questions. Imaging tech- remarkable concepts emerge.” “There’s a very, very collaborative cal economic theory.) nology, science and policy can thus inter- One of Mackey’s occasional collabora- atmosphere here, more so than at the “In my work, we deal with people sect; the visible brain reactions of some- tors is Fumiko Hoeft, a senior research other places I’ve been,” Hoeft said. “At with learning disabilities and developmen- one choosing a risky investment, deciding scientist at the Center for Interdisciplin- the rtfMRI meetings we have radiologists, tal problems, which led me to rtfMRI, to skateboard off a building or shooting ary Brain Sciences Research and the p s y c h i a t r i s t s , which gave me an heroin may be similar and could help in ‘Pain has gotten so Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral p s y c h o l o g i s t s , excuse to talk the search for viable solutions to wide- Sciences, who started off working with neuroscientists, complex, it’s impossible for with Brian,” Hoeft spread health-related social problems. imaging as a potential clinical tool. But anesthesiologists, one person to understand it said. “I had heard “The imaging is getting better,” Knut- experts on depres- son said. “I have faith that the brain is fMRI (and rtfMRI) has limits. For one all,’ Mackey said. he was interested thing, it relies on what Hoeft called unreal sion, experts on in rewards and not a processing device; it’s a valuation situations. You can’t create images of decision-making punishment, so I device, and the molecular level of analy- how athletes successfully suppress pain, ... and all these thought, hmmm, sis is not necessarily going to give us the for example, because they’re on the people have the same goal—to make an this might be useful for studying learning. best functional prediction. playing field, not in a lab, as they do it. impact in clinical settings. I thought his work sounded absolutely fas- “Money influences the brain and vice Moreover, there are so many chemicals “The big thing is that here everyone cinating. So we’re hoping to collaborate. versa; there’s cross-talk. The issue is coursing through their bodies as they seems willing to offer their expertise. It’s That was sort of unexpected, and I hope which of these links—which are poten- play that figuring out cause and effect is easier to get in touch with people you it goes well.” tially infinite—are most important.” practically hopeless. don’t know, to get advice from them. I Knutson began working with fMRI in And those links are finally visible, just “RtfMRI is very expensive to run, it never thought I’d be working on pain. And the mid-1990s, one of very few people as the intensity and shape of our pain is relies on unreal situations, it requires lots now I’m collaborating with Sean.” doing so then. In fact, it was suggested beginning to be visible. If seeing is believ- of training, and health insurance won’t to the young psychologist that he was ing, perhaps too it is the first step toward pay for it because it’s experimental,” she Risky investments working hard at not getting a good job. treating conditions that cost us resources said. But she added that functional MRI Another of Hoeft’s colleagues is Brian But he landed at the National Institutes and cause us suffering.

FALL 2007 5 MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu l.a. cicero

Director Shelley Fisher Fishkin, credited merican studies came to life in the around, most noticeably with the hire of Shelley Fisher 1950s, at a time when one could be Fishkin as faculty program director. with turning the program around, is a confident about what that meant. Though the program today exudes excitement, “the leading advocate of taking American stud- America was the United States, doubts will never be put to rest, and that’s a good whose culture was perceived as thing,” said Saldívar, the Hoagland Family Professor ies global. both exceptional and homoge- in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “We must neous. always be self-critical. American studies needed to be Homogeneity, obviously, is no examined very closely back then, and the new leader- longer on the table. As for exceptionalism, clearly the ship was crucial.” UnitedA States is not just another country. But if glo- Fishkin, an internationally acclaimed scholar of balization means that goods, services, peoples and cul- Mark Twain, started things off with a bang as soon tures refuse to be confined behind national borders, it as she arrived in the fall of 2003 by organizing confer- also means that studying “America” has ceased to be ences on the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Educa- an exercise focused exclusively on the 50 states. Noth- tion and, for a change of pace, The Simpsons. ing happens here outside a larger, international con- “Students all watched The Simpsons, of course, but text. they never watched it critically,” she said. “The notion Thus the transnational turn in American studies—a that social criticism happens on TV wasn’t something recognition that the multiple links between “here” they had ever really thought of.” and “not-here” are omnipresent and run in both di- Controversy over the field comes with the territory, rections. This year’s national meeting of the American she suggested recently. Studies Association (ASA), in fact, is titled “América “Those criticisms [by the Faculty Senate] indicated Aquí: Transhemispheric Visions and Community Con- a lack of consensus concerning American studies’ body nections.” of knowledge and the appropriate methodologies for The old American studies, said English Professor dealing with that body of knowledge,” she said. “And Ramón Saldívar, “meant looking at the hemisphere American studies is nothing if not a continuing debate through U.S. critical paradigms. Today we see the in- on those issues. Ever since the founding of this nation, terrelationships, not just the one-way relations. people have debated over the definition of America.” “For example, immigration is now at the core of the But, she cautioned, American studies is not for ev- field: What kind of social and structural forces—say, eryone. “If someone wants a very clear definition, they health, or the arts—cut across nations and boundar- should probably stay within a discipline. American ies and function independently of them? This doesn’t studies has lots of unresolved challenges, and multiple ‘Whenever people with mean that the concept of ‘nation’ has been abandoned, methodologies are key.” but rather that it’s been supplemented.” That multiplicity is what attracts undergraduates. power act on visions American studies was born in the years following An alumnus of the program who graduated in the World War II, at the same time as other area studies 1980s remembered how much he loved his major be- of America that rest on programs. It was a modest affair, top-heavy with lit- cause, flipping through the course bulletin, he could erature and intellectual history and lacking any urgent take any class with the word “America” in its title. oversimplification, myth and agenda, with no nationwide meetings or journal to “Undergraduates choose American studies because bind it together. of its breadth,” Saldívar said. “Students love to ask big a blind faith that America is In 1969, a radical caucus appeared at the second na- questions, and American studies allows them to do tional meeting of the ASA demanding that the organi- that.” always right – or, for that zation address the critical political issues of the day: If there is controversy today—and where would aca- civil rights, the war and the women’s movement. (The demia be without it?—it has nothing to do with the matter, always wrong – that ASA was, of course, not the only academic association number of majors—which is higher than ever—or the to find its definitions cast asunder by the 1960s.) The quality of the teaching—Academic Council members is a call to us as American field’s framework was thus pushed outward, and a tra- are lining up to teach their courses, Fishkin and Saldí- dition was born of engaging critically with the mean- var said. studies scholars to do our ings of “America.” Pluralism rather than universalism Rather, it might have to do with the limitless possi- became the watchword. Today, the ASA has chapters bilities of the transnational turn. Given that there is no work,’ Fishkin said. nationwide and its own journal, American Quarterly. corner of the world where the United States has not left Similar organizations exist worldwide. There is also an an imprint, might that not mean that anything goes? active discussion list on H-Net (h-amstdy). Might that mean, say, that Mexican history becomes just an extension of U.S. history? Absolutely not, Saldívar said. “Moving away from Watching “The Simpsons” the specificity of a national history in a way that ne- At Stanford, American studies was first approved in gates that history is absolutely wrong. If you’re moving 1975, and the first quarter-century of the program’s away from national identity, that’s wrong.” existence was fruitful and uncontroversial. But by Neither Mexican history nor U.S. history, then, can 2001, some deans and members of the faculty began be seen in isolation from one another. Nothing, in fact, expressing concerns that the number of majors was can be seen in isolation in today’s world. declining and that there was not a sufficiently strong intellectual focus to the program, a complaint familiar to other interdisciplinary programs. The program Study abroad was reauthorized by the Faculty Senate, but for fewer “As part of this larger paradigm shift,” Fishkin said, years than in the past. At the same time, it received a “American studies encourages its majors to go abroad mandate to hire a senior director to infuse new direc- and to study foreign languages. Students are often tion, and it was given funding for a Humanities Center surprised at how going abroad relates directly to their workshop and postdoctoral fellowships. work here. It’s very exciting.” The medicine worked, and things were turned She pointed to examples such as a 2006 honors

6 FALL 2007 MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://multi.stanford.edu

Do America, Do the World

thesis on Allen Ginsberg (sparked by Stanford’s ac- he said. “There are specifi c contexts and histories that quisition of the poet’s papers), which took a student have to be respected.” to Prague, where Ginsberg had moved in dissident cir- Lee was off to St. Petersburg, Russia, the follow- cles; or another student whose project on Chilean farm ing day to attend an American studies conference. His A new publication, The workers in the 19th-century U.S. Southwest took her colleague and co-organizer of the Humanities Center to Chile; or senior Caley Anderson, who got a better workshop, Nigel Hatton, had spent the summer at Journal of Transnational sense of U.S. environmental management by studying similar meetings in Ireland, Denmark, England and similar issues in Australia. the Czech Republic. American Studies, will be “American studies was the only major in the entire There are some Europeans who are skeptical about bulletin that fi t what I wanted to get out of my Stan- U.S. scholars imposing an American studies paradigm a focal point of the ford education,” said Anderson, formerly a biology on the rest of the world, Hatton admitted, adding that major. “American studies appealed to me because you “it will require a constant conversation.” growing field. could create your own concentration. I chose environ- “Being in all those places certainly broadened my mentalism.” view,” he said, and that in large part is the point: to She found her calling, she said, in the late Jay show Americans that the world, including the world of Fliegelman’s course on American literature and cul- American studies, is larger than they thought. ture. An intern with the Environmental Protection Undergraduates are fi guring that out. To help them Agency last summer, Anderson is now interested in along, Fishkin has taught a 2-credit course to prepare communications and the environment. students to attend a national ASA meeting. Hatton JAN HAFNER Nationwide, too, the country’s most prestigious was the teaching assistant. American studies departments and programs are re- “The students were great,” he said. “They spent quiring students, especially graduate students, to be the quarter studying the conference program, fi guring profi cient in foreign languages. They collaborate with out which sessions they wanted to attend and doing centers and programs in African American, Chicano, research on the speakers. They dressed well; they even Asian American and Native American studies. made business cards. It was a great way to acclimate In her widely publicized November 2004 presiden- them to academia and to American studies. The class tial address to the ASA, Fishkin explicitly and power- really spoke to the vibrancy of Stanford’s program. fully addressed the transnational turn, calling it es- “And they danced their heads off at the reception sential for overcoming the “nationalism, arrogance the closing night.” and Manichean oversimplifi cation” often attributed Hatton and Lee furthermore are associate manag- to Americans. ing editors of a brand-new publication, The Journal “Whenever people with power act on visions of of Transnational American Studies, to be launched America that rest on oversimplifi cation, myth and a in 2008 by Stanford’s American studies program and blind faith that America is always right—or, for that the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Ameri- matter, always wrong—that is a call to us as American can Cultures and Global Contexts Center. Fishkin is a studies scholars to do our work,” she said. founding editor of the refereed journal, which will be The work—combating stereotypes and simplifi ca- offered online for free. tions—leads one quickly to the realization that national boundaries are not the most useful way of as- Making connections sessing cultures. “We are likely to focus less on the Graduate students Nigel Hatton, above, United States as a static and stable territory and popu- Lest anyone think that the linkages between U.S. lation ... and more on the nation as a participant in a and non-U.S. topics are forced, Fishkin offers exam- and Steven Lee, below, organized global fl ow of people, ideas, texts and products,” she ples of how one thing leads to another. went on to say. During her presidential address to the ASA, she told a Humanities Center workshop called her audience about 19th-century Scots oppressed by “American Cultures/Transnational Ameri- England who idealized American Indians struggling Humanities Center workshop against the same enemy. One such Scot went by the can Studies.” Stanford does not have a PhD program in Ameri- name of Teyoninhokarawen, as he was half Mohawk can studies, but the Program in Modern Thought and and a chief in Canada; he fought the United States in Literature (MTL) comes pretty close. MTL students 1812. He also translated the Bible and works by Sir often work as teaching assistants for American studies Walter Scott into Mohawk to prepare the Indians for classes. the white society that awaited them. They also have been in charge of the occasional A story like that, she said, epitomizes a transna- “American Cultures” workshop at the Humanities tional vision that doesn’t hold much store by national Center. That was the workshop encouraged by the boundaries and that can reshape our understanding of Faculty Senate in 2001. North American history and culture. In 2006-07, it was called “American Cultures/ Even Mark Twain is not off-limits. Several years Transnational American Studies.” The fall workshop ago, Fishkin famously uncovered a play by Twain at addressed the interaction of Asian and Latino cultures UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library; the play, Is He Dead? in the United States; winter quarter was devoted to the opens on Broadway this autumn. transnational life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois and It turns out that Twain wrote it while living in Vi- James Baldwin; and spring brought speakers on anti- enna in the 1890s (his daughter was studying music colonialism and attitudes in the Soviet Union toward there), and he set it in 19th-century France. “So even black American writers. Twain, that most American of American authors, One of the organizers of that workshop was Ste- had important links to non-U.S. cultures,” she said. ven Lee, an MTL student writing a dissertation com- Twain also was an early animal-rights advocate, and paring multiculturalism in the Soviet Union and the he shaped the movements both here and in Britain. So, United States, an obviously transnational theme. He yet another transnational story. cautioned, however, that in general “the celebration “I tell my students, even though it’s an oxymoron, or fetishization of the transnational turn as something stalk serendipity and keep an open mind,” Fishkin inherently innovative is a real risk.” said. “And students fi nd it exciting to explore all the “The nation isn’t going anywhere anytime soon,” unexpected places their research can take them.” FALL 2007 7 An ambitious agenda for health research

L.A. Cicero BY ANN ARVIN the plethora of data produced with these tools. The pace of fundamental discovery science will accelerate accordingly. Scientists envision that devices used to do reakthroughs in basic science are fun- genetic and functional analyses of cells in the lab will damental to making major advances become more powerful and less expensive, making it in human health. This equation possible for clinicians to use them to obtain informa- sounds simple, but the path from an tion about their patients’ susceptibility to diseases. Re- exciting basic laboratory discovery to search at Stanford is also advancing the possibility of a valuable practical application for the such inventions as artificial corneas, robotic surgical prevention or cure of human diseases tools and chip implants in the brain to restore move- has many barriers and wrong turns. ment to quadriplegics. Nevertheless, the Stanford faculty and their students • Integration: It might seem that scientists and phy- Bhave made many remarkable contributions in the right sicians will be overwhelmed by the deluge of infor- direction along this daunting road. The Initiative on mation these new tools are creating. Fortunately, the Human Health (IHH), a major focus of The Stanford opposite outcome is more likely. Researchers in the Challenge fundraising campaign, aims to accelerate new field of biocomputation are defining methods to Stanford’s contributions to improving human health synthesize data about genes and proteins into models and well-being now and in the years to come. that explain how cells of many different types actually Success in making fundamental scientific observa- work. Social sciences research integrates information tions and translating these observations into innova- from whole populations to identify risks to health that tions that benefit human health is never one person’s may never have been suspected. Integration of com- achievement. The spark for the IHH is the recognition plex data sets could allow health care to be tailored that building multidisciplinary research will determine to the individual—taking into account our genetic As dean and vice provost, Arvin over- what Stanford can do in helping people to live health- inheritances, the bacteria and viruses that we carry, ier lives in the 21st century. or the precise abnormalities of a cancerous cell, along sees university research issues, interdis- In medicine, many important scientific questions with details of our personal medical histories, to de- originate in the mind of the insightful physician at the sign preventive regimens or make rapid diagnoses and ciplinary initiatives and independent labs, bedside. At Stanford, the same physician has often re- personalize treatments for each of us. and the offices of Technology Licensing, turned to the laboratory to find new therapies, sometimes with the help of researchers from other disci- Environmental Health and Safety, Sexual plines. Consider the example of Dr. Henry Kaplan and Fellowships and grants Edward Ginzton at the Hansen Experimental Physics These and other advances in human health are now Harassment Policy and Research Compli- Laboratory who, together in the 1950s, developed an inextricably linked to combining the clinical sciences ance. approach to radiation therapy that saved the life of a with expertise from biological and physical sciences, child with retinoblastoma in its first application. computer science and engineering. More than ever, The goal of the IHH is to make this tradition a cor- we need to train scientists and clinical investigators nerstone of health-related research at Stanford. Even to master their own disciplines and to move comfort- more than in past decades, we recognize that major ably across disciplines. The IHH will promote such advances in medicine are likely to be the result of mul- educational opportunities for graduate students and tidisciplinary teams. The IHH goal is to offer our fac- postdoctoral fellows by establishing fellowships for ulty and students opportunities to do such work. trainees to pursue programs with advisers from more than one field. The IHH also will make possible new faculty appointments in key areas to enhance research Imaging, invention, integration and teaching related to human health. The IHH has identified three themes that define ar- Strengthening multidisciplinary bioscience and eas in which new research and training efforts could medicine requires incentives. Faculty who propose yield many benefits: imaging, seeing biological pro- research at the intersection of disciplines often have cesses in ways that yield new therapies; invention, trouble attracting support from the government and making tools that enhance research and devices that foundations because they are moving into uncharted solve health problems; and integration, synthesizing territory. The IHH will give such ideas a boost by pro- the massive amounts of information emerging from viding seed funds to projects that are judged by our vast databases related to human health. faculty to be high risk but likely to have high impact if • Imaging: Our modern knowledge about the human successful. This is a daunting task, but we already have body began with the precise anatomical drawings of a track record through Bio-X, the pioneering Stanford Leonardo da Vinci and others during the Renaissance. program to bridge the biosciences and the physical sci- In the next iteration, microscopes were invented that re- ences. The Bio-X innovation grants awarded to mul- vealed structures too small for the eye to see, laying the tidisciplinary research teams have yielded impressive foundation for my field, microbiology and infectious results. The $700,000 in grants has paved the way diseases. Today, electron microscopes reveal cellular for $70 million in government support. The IHH will structures at the nanoscale and magnetic resonance im- provide broad support for research in basic biological/ aging has revolutionized clinicians’ ability to diagnose biomedical sciences and Bio-X, as well as target new illness and treat patients. We are about to make another programs in neurosciences, stem cell biology and re- leap forward in imaging, equivalent to the change from generative medicine, and cancer. a still photograph to a movie. The 21st-century ways Stanford is one of the few universities with such an of “seeing” will involve watching events happen on a ambitious agenda for multidisciplinary innovation in cellular level in real time in tissues, organs and entire human health. In taking on this challenge, we are for- organisms. Researchers will be able to watch thousands tunate to have our medical school on the same campus of neurons as they fire in response to a stimulus, rather as the university’s six other schools. This facilitates than being limited to observations about a single cell. face-to-face interactions between faculty and students Clinicians will engineer molecules that can hunt down with diverse expertise and with the clinical faculty diseased cells at their earliest stages and literally illu- at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard minate them on a computer screen long before current Children’s Hospital. methods would detect any signs of illness. Through these interactions, we will build upon the • Invention: New tools such as genetic sequencing remarkable advances in human health that have been and microarrays are changing the paradigm of health- achieved by the traditional medical disciplines. The related research. Instead of approaching a question IHH will serve as the catalyst for the next generation with a preconceived hypothesis and testing it, research- of innovators at Stanford to chart new directions in ers derive insights from a comprehensive analysis of basic and translational health-related research.

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8 FALL 2007