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

in your head:New imaging technology is allowing physicians and researchers to make a quantum leap in their efforts to decipher the brain, page 4

neuro-X:The Neuroscience Institute has an ambitious program that brings together researchers from many disciplines, page 4

Thinking global:American studies, an interdisciplinary undergraduate program, is making sure students take a broad view, page 6

human healTh:Dean Ann Arvin outlines the university’s translational vision for health research at Stanford, page 8

See story, page 2

PHOTO: CONNIE SHAO

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.

L.A. CICERO

STUART SNYDMAN

L.A. CICERO

2 FALL 2007

Virtually unlimited knowledgeMULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .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 oddi-ties, 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.

Slowly, systematic disciplinary and alphabetical catalogs emerged, and “libraries” became places that stored books and manuscripts—and little else.

Today, one doesn’t trip over skeletons or jewel boxes. But libraries—or cybraries, as University Librarian Mi-chael Keller likes to call them—contain the world. Ab-solutely everything is there. The age of the collection has returned.

“The virtual makes that possible,” said As-sunta Pisani, associate university librarian for collections and ser-vices. “One of the old limitations of librar-ies was space. There were beautiful rooms with displays, which then became larger and more organized, and decisions had to be made about space and efficiency. But now it doesn’t matter.”

The relationship be-tween hyperlinks and 17th-century collecting practices might not be obvious. But the chief virtue of digitization, from the point of view

of Keller and his colleagues, is that you can dig deep—really, really deep. You can drill through a text to find the point at which child psychology veers into electri-cal engineering, the moment of the genesis of scientific arguments within philosophy, the places where biology bumps up against chemistry and physics, where relics and stones and texts can be viewed as part of a whole.

Informatics, which posits that everything ultimately is linked to everything else, now can actually link most everything through taxonomic indexing, a highly com-plex process of assigning semantic categories to clumps of text that then can be summoned in a certain, rel-evant order, relying on what Keller calls the text’s fin-gerprint. With that, instead of running through the stacks from Spanish history (DP, second floor) to so-cial history (HN, way down in the basement) and then over to the Law Library or up into the Bing Wing to find Jewish law (KBM) and then back up to Green to check Spanish lyric poetry (PQ, third floor), it’s all in one place. Or it will be soon.

“I’m expecting 9 million books incoming, so the magnitude of my informatic challenges is going up dra-matically,” said Keller, obviously delighted to have such problems, largely the result of Stanford’s collaboration with Google.

Disciplines fusedIn Keller’s view, there’s an old narrative and a new

narrative. The old one is a ribbon of text, a stream of characters organized from beginning to end. The new narrative is the old narrative with interruptions, with high-octane Java, with links and spreadsheets and vid-eos and citations and whatever else will help the reader make connections.

Keller started off his professional life as a music li-brarian. So how did he get from there to book robots, to the pioneering HighWire Press (online home to more than 1,000 journals) and to cybraries?

“It’s the training,” he said. “You study physics, physiology, mechanical engineering, the creative pro-cess. You read code, psychology, history, reception, patronage. We cover the whole waterfront. That’s the perspective we bring to the party.”

“Libraries are participating in a fusing of disci-plines,” Pisani said. “We are acquiring packages of publications or information now, not just traditional acquisitions.

“The Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Con-gress assigns books to a specific place, and once there, the book doesn’t belong anywhere else. That’s being undone with digital. Before, I’d know where to browse in the stacks for a specific topic, but, by the same to-ken, I’d miss books with different call numbers.

“That’s all changing. The order is gone. There is a new kind of order. Something really important is hap-

pening in the way knowledge is being delivered.”In the years following the 1989 Loma Prieta earth-

quake, the people involved in the remodeling of Green Library sometimes worried that their efforts might be misdirected, given the advent of the much-discussed bookless library. It didn’t turn out that way.

Henry Lowood, curator for the Germanic, history of science and technology, and film and media collec-tions, was on the staff at that time. “The doomsday projections didn’t carry weight at a place like Stanford because we’re able to acquire the new while maintain-ing the old,” he said.

Gerhard Casper, who came to Stanford as university president in 1992, had decided that the library would be rebuilt, and Keller, who arrived in 1993, could take into account the swift technological advances since the earthquake.

“My whole career is littered with cases of trying to figure out what people want in libraries,” said Keller. “Strategic thinking is part of my toolkit. What do you do with a great old building when you have the oppor-tunity to rebuild?”

The redesign of Green Library called for a variety of spaces to account for the new variety of uses and resources: quiet, noisy, computing, group, individual, closed, open. Resource centers for humanities and so-cial sciences were created.

“We returned all the big spaces to their original, we tore out all the foolishness that was constructed from 1919 to 1989, and with all those walls wide open, we installed lots of conduit for powerful signal,” he said.

Casper, at the dedication ceremony for the opening of the Bing Wing in 1999, remarked that the gaping holes at the construction site had reminded him of the bombed-out buildings of his Hamburg childhood. At no point, he said—his talk was titled “Who Needs a Library Anyway?”—did he or anyone else seriously en-tertain a libraryless future.

Subject specialistsCurators, or subject specialists, such as Lowood,

who have advanced degrees, are up to date on the de-bates in their disciplines and on what is going on in the information trade, formerly known as the book trade.

“What’s accessible and interesting that we can ac-quire in order to make Stanford a distinctive place for musicologists or early childhood education experts or mechanical engineers?” Keller asked.

“The subject specialists understand how their disci-plines interact and challenge one another, so this whole sense of multidisciplinarity is reflected in how we build collections.

“Librarians have always been multidisciplinary, up on all the big strategic innovations. We collect in all fields, we identify all subjects, we develop new tech-niques afforded by digital versions, we provide the means to analyze works by subjects, we make correla-tions ... we’re it.”

Pisani also pointed to the range of the activities of Stanford’s 35 subject specialists.

“We’re farsighted,” she said. “Some libraries have created separate organizations to acquire electronic con-tent. Here we believe that content and knowledge are fundamental to a good collection development program 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-out the collections, from ancient to high-tech, which he said “encourages a sort of interdisciplinarity.”

Though libraries today are no longer simply the sum of whatever arrives at their doorstep, they still seek and receive collections. Among Stanford’s outstanding spe-cial collections are the papers of Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg and John Steinbeck; an important se-ries of 18th-century French political economy pam-phlets; the records of the Farm Worker Archive and the National Council of La Raza; and a wonderful collec-tion of artifacts and papers documenting the history of Silicon Valley.

And the special collections are not necessarily all in the department of Special Collections. The Archive of Recorded Sound, hidden downstairs in the Music Li-brary, is the repository for some 300,000 recordings (including thousands of 78 rpm records), the entire recordings of the Monterey Jazz Festival, remarkable contraptions from more than a century ago that actu-ally produce fine music, radio news shows from World War II recorded on heavy 16-inch discs, voices of the most prominent poets of the 1950s and all the KZSU tracks from the 1960s, among other treasures.

Special Collections used to be a sort of sanctuary, Pisani said, but over the past decade more and more students have been making use of its holdings. The sub-ject librarians have close ties to their disciplinary coun-terparts in academic departments, who in turn use the library holdings as anchors for their classes.

Art librarian Peter Blank and Amber Ruiz,

curator of the Visual Resources Center.

The center is embarked upon a campaign

to reach out to the broader Stanford com-

munity. Below, University Librarian Michael

Keller. Bottom, a robotic page-turning

and scanning device, the centerpiece of

SULAIR’s array of on-campus digitization

capabilities.

‘I’m expecting 9 million books incoming, so the

magnitude of my informatic challenges is going

up dramatically,’ Keller said.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

L.A. CICERO

FALL 2007 3

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

“We want them to be familiar with primary sources,” Pisani said, “to really actually see a let-ter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

New librariesAmong all the buildings going up in the next

decade or so at Stanford will be at least two new libraries: engineering and art. The former is ex-pected to be bookless within a decade or so. It will therefore have fewer non-professional staff members but more reference librarians to help with digital resources.

Helen Josephine, head librarian of the Engi-neering Library, said that traditionally librarians in her field would have purchased materials along departmental lines, asking, for example, what does mechanical engineering need?

“But increasingly, those students and research are crossing disciplines, so they may be interested in the biological or medical applications of some-thing in mechanical engineering,” she said. “So the materials they need to frame their research are no longer bound by mechanical engineering.” Thus various libraries end up coordinating their purchases and use.

“Suddenly the unobvious becomes obvious by linking across disciplines,” she said. “One of our design professors here says a good design is the one where you look at it and you say, ‘Of course, it’s so obvious!’

“Using that thinking, we’re looking at the li-brary as a place for the intersection of all those ideas. So it’s not necessary that we have all the objects of information here. We can point to it on-line and help students make it applicable for their research.”

The new engineering library will be in a por-tion of the School of Engineering Center that also contains a cafe and a “research gym,” space that,

by definition, is flexible. Josephine said she’s look-ing into ensuring a library presence there outside the formal confines of the library—maybe just a desk or a terminal—something to let students know that they can contact a reference librarian whenever or wherever they get stuck.

Unlike the engineering library, the projected art and architecture library—one of the central pieces of the university’s Arts Initiative—will have plenty of bookshelves. Many arts (and humanities) jour-nals are not available online, and reproduction of images is not always reliable.

“The very nature of research in an object-based discipline is inextricably linked to an object-based learning environment, where the form of the book or magazine as physical object is often as imbued with cultural coding as its content,” said Peter Blank, head librarian of the Art and Architecture Library. “There is no substitute for placing such objects in students’ hands. We’re dealing with a different kind of data here.”

But clearly there is a limit to the number of art objects an art library can have, and Blank and his staff are also deeply committed to making the online Visual Resources Center (VRC), which houses digital images and slides, accessible, useful and integral to departments across campus.

In 2006 the VRC was transferred from the Art and Art History Department to Stanford Uni-versity Libraries and Academic Information Re-sources (SULAIR).

“SULAIR brought considerable technical sup-port to VRC, as well as a different awareness of how visual materials can be used across disci-plines,” he said. “We’re refocusing a somewhat inward-looking operation outward to make con-nections across the campus. Anyone on campus can log on to the ImageBase. We’re upgrading equipment, systemizing backups and cleaning up data. We’ve got an excellent team.”

When Blank says the library was “inward-look-ing,” 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 leanBlank envisions the art library as a “labora-

tory space to support a discovery environment,” a place with foot traffic, viewing technology and rotating exhibits showing off an admirable collec-tion of ephemera and art objects.

“We’re trying to recreate the whole environ-ment 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 bet-ter. 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 ob-jects 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 finding stuff like that here and retrieving it.”

Virtual and comfortableThe physical site and contents of libraries have

thus not been overtaken by the virtual. They need each other. The Lane and Bender reading rooms in Green Library, with their overstuffed chairs, the interplay of natural and indoor lighting and the generous wooden tables, are beacons. The grand old spaces (and less grand seminar and group-study rooms) were retained or revived. Libraries, after all, are meeting places, the most obvious site for cross-disciplinary communities to emerge.

A user survey in spring 2003 showed that stu-dents place great value on the library as a place to study and that they rely upon reference librarians to assist them with online resources.

Librarians, in turn, are using the Internet to bring in students and researchers. Branner Li-brary, for example, at the School of Earth Sci-ences, features an informative and attractive blog with information on books, journals, pollution and earthquakes, updates on Geographic Information Services (GIS) and a list of relevant del.icio.us tags, a social-networking system for identifying useful bookmarks. The main Information Center webpage also has tags, blogs, research Q&As and a host of news items, all linked to appropriate resources.

“What’s exciting is seeing the constant evolu-tion and reinvention of the services and informa-tion we can provide to people,” Josephine said. “I remember being an undergraduate at Doe Library [at Berkeley] and being just awed by that huge reading room full of card catalogs. It’s come full circle; we’re back to that awe-inspiring sense.

“I’m very jazzed; it’s very exciting. We have more of a feel that we can experiment with things and see what works. We don’t have to have every-thing perfect.”

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

4 FALL 2007

Adding “neuro” to your research appears to be a savvy move. There’s neurotechnology and neuroethics and neuroeconom-ics and neurolaw. Pictures of the brain, it is said, can show us why we kill, why we like Bach, why we construct stories

the way we do and why we choose the wrong boy-friends. And very precise images of the brain hold out the promise of very precise tinkering.

Articles about this phenomenon are in daily newspapers and popular magazines and on web-sites. There are claims of mind-reading and self-rewiring. The website Slate reported recently on the year’s top five neuroscience achievements, each with brilliant and horrifying applications. Maybe it all started when George H. W. Bush in July 1990 proclaimed the next 10 years to be “the decade of the brain.”

Why has the brain become so popular? “Be-cause people have realized they have one,” re-sponds William Mobley, founding director of the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford (NIS). “They’ve realized that everything that matters is going on in the brain. And the how explains the why: Why do I like this music and not that music? Why me?”

That last question, common to most human beings, got Mobley, the John E. Cahill Family Professor in the School of Medicine, into neuro-science to begin with. The field is an amalgam of neurology, molecular biology, cognitive psychol-

ogy, genetics, electrophysiology and biochemistry, among others. Cognitive neuroscience, which lies at the intersection of psychology and neurology, looks at the more ethereal, less physical aspects of the brain’s activity.

This fall, classes about the brain are being given in about a dozen departments at the schools of Engineering, Medicine, Education, and Humani-ties and Sciences.

Translational missionOne of five institutes at the School of Medicine,

NIS is in the midst of a campaign to realize its vi-sion of synthesizing molecules and mind, analysis and application, and science and society—essen-tially the translational vision of the medical school often repeated by Dean Philip Pizzo. Starting with disease, this initiative—for the time being called “Neuro-X”—will build outward, incorporating an ever-widening field of experts.

“We want to do things no department could do,” Mobley said last summer. “So we’re going from science to medicine to society, and that’s what it’s all about, that’s what it should be. No department can do that. We’re creating a palette of many, many colors.”

Brian Wandell, another leader at NIS, and also co-chair of the Stanford Initiative on Human Health and current chair of the Department of Psychology, is similarly enthused about NIS and the array of possibilities. There are nearly 80 fac-ulty members, representing some 15 departments

in five of Stanford’s seven schools, teaching some aspect of neuroscience.

“The NIS has the broadest representation of any of the institutes of medicine,” he said. “Sci-entists from engineering, H&S and medicine are all deeply involved in neuroscience research, and they all see problems from different points of view. Each feels strongly that their work is important, and each one advocates for more re-sources to train more students. And they’re all right.

“I’ve been at Stanford for 30 years, and the ex-pectation here is that people get along and help each other. By and large, it works.”

The NIS plan calls for five clusters: the Program in Neural Circuit Control, devoted to the molecular and cellular basis for circuit formation, function and learning; the Cen-ter for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imag-ing, where people from varied disciplines will work together on shared imaging instruments; the Center for the Mind, Brain and Computa-tion, devoted to bridging the gap between the theoretical and experimental sides of brain re-search; the Program for Translational Neuro-science, which will study malfunction and re-pair; and the Center on the Brain and Society, which will emphasize neuroethics, education, decision-making and law.

In other words, from the microscopic to the societal. And one day, if Neuro-X leaders have their way, all these researchers will share space.

The human brain comprises 25 billion

neurons that communicate through more

or less 25 trillion specialized junctions

called synapses.

Try taking a picture of that.

The explosion of interest in neurosci-

ence over the past decade

is due largely to advances

in imaging technology, which

enables scientists to do their

work and unites researchers

from different areas who dis-

cover they can all profit from

the same gadget.

“A vast amount of both invention and

research involves being able to see stuff,”

said psychologist Brian Wandell, co-di-

rector of the Neuroscience Institute at

Stanford (NIS) and chair of the Psychol-

ogy Department. “Visualization is an enor-

mous help. Stanford has been a world

leader in this, but now we’re seeing ways

that will allow us to be even better.”

After the conversations that led to

“Neuro-X” (see accompanying article)

showed that imaging was a priority

across the board, NIS launched a neuro-

modeling lab.

“This lab should function

as a crossroads, a watering

hole, a place for people to

come together casually and

share expertise and enjoy cof-

fee and mingle, which we hope

will lead to a new curriculum

in computational neurosci-

ence,” said Stephen Smith, a professor

of molecular and cellular physiology at

the School of Medicine who works on the

brain’s synaptic circuitry.

“Steve Smith and I image things at

opposite ends of the size scale,” Wandell

said. Smith looks at lab samples; Wandell

looks at living humans. “You need to work

your way up and down the scale. Using

MRI, we’re working hard to link the nano

slices used in pathology to the larger

images, a few millimeters wide, of whole

healthy people, creating an integrative

imaging program to teach all those tech-

niques to students.”

Real-time functional magnetic reso-

nance imaging (rtfMRI) is being applied

to a host of neuroscientific problems.

Among them: the alleviation of chronic

pain and the ability to make good or bad

decisions.

SEE YOUR PAINPain is not just a medical condition;

Stanford’s online Encyclopedia of Phi-

losophy devotes pages and pages of

philosophical analysis to the subject. It is

both a biochemical and a profoundly sub-

jective experience. A pain questionnaire

widely used by physicians offers patients

some 100 adjectives (pulsing, drilling,

wrenching, scalding, taut, unbearable,

nagging, torturing) to help them describe

their condition.

RtfMRI is finally allowing medical and

engineering researchers to get close

to this intersection of subjectivity and

physicality.

Sean Mackey, co-director of the Pain

Working Group at NIS, said, “I knew in

grad school [studying electrical engineer-

ing] that I was going into medicine.

“This is a natural meld of medicine

and high tech. I did early work in cardio,

then anesthesia, then pain management.

I looked at what people were doing and I

said, wow, we’re in the dark ages. We’re

still fusing people’s backs! We’re giving

them the same drugs as 20 years ago!

So I got into imaging and systems neuro-

science and networking.”

Most famously, Mackey’s group has

enabled people to literally see their pain

as they are experiencing it while inside an

MRI scanner.

“I don’t want to sensationalize the

clinical applications of this,” he cautioned.

“We’re not selling snake oil. There’s lots

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, how-

ever, are legion.

“Think about it,” Mackey said. “People

are rewiring their own brains. You could

build up soldiers’ capacity to absorb

pain. You could improve memory so stu-

An entirely new perspective

Stanford’s latest brainchildMULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

Brian Knutson

Patients in Sean Mackey’s laboratory – in this case, someone with chronic neck and arm pain – learn to control a specific region of their brain as they watch real time fMRI feedback, with a resulting change in their pain.

COURTESY SEAN MACKEY

FALL 2007 5

dents would score better on tests. You

could alter the cognitive development of

autistic kids. These projects all have very

significant ethical ramifications. That’s

why we need smart people discussing

these things, and so far we’re doing very

basic science, with no application.”

Pain research at Stanford unites sci-

entists, physicians and engineers, and

“the collaboration is fascinating,” Mackey

said. “Pain has gotten so complex, it’s

impossible for one person to understand

it all. Disparate fields are necessary, with

everyone thinking outside the box, and

remarkable concepts emerge.”

One of Mackey’s occasional collabora-

tors is Fumiko Hoeft, a senior research

scientist at the Center for Interdisciplin-

ary Brain Sciences Research and the

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral

Sciences, who started off working with

imaging as a potential clinical tool. But

fMRI (and rtfMRI) has limits. For one

thing, it relies on what Hoeft called unreal

situations. You can’t create images of

how athletes successfully suppress pain,

for example, because they’re on the

playing field, not in a lab, as they do it.

Moreover, there are so many chemicals

coursing through their bodies as they

play that figuring out cause and effect is

practically hopeless.

“RtfMRI is very expensive to run, it

relies on unreal situations, it requires lots

of training, and health insurance won’t

pay for it because it’s experimental,” she

said. But she added that functional MRI

(though not real-time functional MRI, the

kind Mackey uses for his pain research)

for pre-surgical planning can finally be

reimbursed by health insurance, which

she called very exciting news.

“So the cost has to come

down,” she said. “Policy has

to change in order for this to

be applied.”

At Stanford, there is a good

chance of planting the seeds

of such change because pol-

icy and medical researchers

often interact.

“There’s a very, very collaborative

atmosphere here, more so than at the

other places I’ve been,” Hoeft said. “At

the rtfMRI meetings we have radiologists,

p s y c h i a t r i s t s ,

p s ycho l og i s t s ,

neuroscientists,

anesthesiologists,

experts on depres-

sion, experts on

decision-making

... and all these

people have the same goal—to make an

impact in clinical settings.

“The big thing is that here everyone

seems willing to offer their expertise. It’s

easier to get in touch with people you

don’t know, to get advice from them. I

never thought I’d be working on pain. And

now I’m collaborating with Sean.”

RISKY INVESTMENTSAnother of Hoeft’s colleagues is Brian

Knutson, assistant professor of psychol-

ogy. He is part of a new group of

researchers called neuroeconomists—

psychologists, economists and neurolo-

gists who essentially investigate decision-

making. The results, they say,

can illuminate not only why

people make unwise invest-

ments but also the origins of

certain mental health disor-

ders, including addiction. (It is

a field not without controversy,

with some economists alleg-

ing that proponents misunderstand classi-

cal economic theory.)

“In my work, we deal with people

with learning disabilities and developmen-

tal problems, which led me to rtfMRI,

which gave me an

excuse to talk

with Brian,” Hoeft

said. “I had heard

he was interested

in rewards and

punishment, so I

thought, hmmm,

this might be useful for studying learning.

I thought his work sounded absolutely fas-

cinating. So we’re hoping to collaborate.

That was sort of unexpected, and I hope

it goes well.”

Knutson began working with fMRI in

the mid-1990s, one of very few people

doing so then. In fact, it was suggested

to the young psychologist that he was

working hard at not getting a good job.

But he landed at the National Institutes

of Health, where he found a mentor who

was interested in emotions. How to elicit

emotions? the mentor wondered. Money,

Knutson replied.

“Technology finally caught up with me,”

Knutson said, reflecting from his perch in

the country’s top psychology department.

Psychologists, of course, are interest-

ed primarily in individual human beings,

not the aggregate, so Knutson’s col-

laboration with economists—like Brian

Wandell’s with Steven Smith—is a case

of technology helping aligned disciplines

answer similar questions. Imaging tech-

nology, science and policy can thus inter-

sect; the visible brain reactions of some-

one choosing a risky investment, deciding

to skateboard off a building or shooting

heroin may be similar and could help in

the search for viable solutions to wide-

spread health-related social problems.

“The imaging is getting better,” Knut-

son said. “I have faith that the brain is

not a processing device; it’s a valuation

device, and the molecular level of analy-

sis is not necessarily going to give us the

best functional prediction.

“Money influences the brain and vice

versa; there’s cross-talk. The issue is

which of these links—which are poten-

tially infinite—are most important.”

And those links are finally visible, just

as the intensity and shape of our pain is

beginning to be visible. If seeing is believ-

ing, perhaps too it is the first step toward

treating conditions that cost us resources

and cause us suffering.

Essential collaborationBut until then, they have to walk from depart-

ment 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 com-munity. The point was not to apply Buddhist phi-losophy to science or vice versa, he told the au-dience then, but to find those places where they overlapped and to find the common ground be-tween 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-leagues brushed him off, he said. But he knew it was the right thing to do, he said, and he is mov-ing ahead.

But along with compassion, some would argue there is also potential trouble; among the most talked-about neuroscientific developments are hu-man enhancement, cloning, genetic tinkering and criminal verdicts without the bother of a trial.

Such possibilities might promise liberation, but they might also offer the means for ethical abuses and human rights violations.

“Sometimes I think we’re like atomic physi-cists in the 1920s,” Mobley said. “Within a few years, something is going to happen with this

technology. But I think neuroscientists can pre-vent abuses. If we have the tools, we’ll use them. You can’t prevent tool-making. The most trans-formative thing in the world right now is neuro-science. It will transform our world like nothing else.”

Brian Wandell

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

‘Pain has gotten so complex, it’s impossible for one person to understand it

all,’ Mackey said.

L.A. CICERO

Fumiko Hoeft, a senior research scientist, is especially interested in using fMRI technology in a clinical setting.

6 FALL 2007

American studies came to life in the 1950s, at a time when one could be confident about what that meant. America was the United States, whose culture was perceived as both exceptional and homoge-neous.

Homogeneity, obviously, is no longer on the table. As for exceptionalism, clearly the United States is not just another country. But if glo-balization means that goods, services, peoples and cul-tures refuse to be confined behind national borders, it also means that studying “America” has ceased to be an exercise focused exclusively on the 50 states. Noth-ing happens here outside a larger, international con-text.

Thus the transnational turn in American studies—a recognition that the multiple links between “here” and “not-here” are omnipresent and run in both di-rections. This year’s national meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), in fact, is titled “América Aquí: Transhemispheric Visions and Community Con-nections.”

The old American studies, said English Professor Ramón Saldívar, “meant looking at the hemisphere through U.S. critical paradigms. Today we see the in-terrelationships, not just the one-way relations.

“For example, immigration is now at the core of the field: What kind of social and structural forces—say, health, or the arts—cut across nations and boundar-ies and function independently of them? This doesn’t mean that the concept of ‘nation’ has been abandoned, but rather that it’s been supplemented.”

American studies was born in the years following World War II, at the same time as other area studies programs. It was a modest affair, top-heavy with lit-erature and intellectual history and lacking any urgent agenda, with no nationwide meetings or journal to bind it together.

In 1969, a radical caucus appeared at the second na-tional meeting of the ASA demanding that the organi-zation address the critical political issues of the day: civil rights, the war and the women’s movement. (The ASA was, of course, not the only academic association to find its definitions cast asunder by the 1960s.) The field’s framework was thus pushed outward, and a tra-dition was born of engaging critically with the mean-ings of “America.” Pluralism rather than universalism became the watchword. Today, the ASA has chapters nationwide and its own journal, American Quarterly. Similar organizations exist worldwide. There is also an active discussion list on H-Net (h-amstdy).

Watching “The Simpsons”At Stanford, American studies was first approved in

1975, and the first quarter-century of the program’s existence was fruitful and uncontroversial. But by 2001, some deans and members of the faculty began expressing concerns that the number of majors was declining and that there was not a sufficiently strong intellectual focus to the program, a complaint famil-iar to other interdisciplinary programs. The program was reauthorized by the Faculty Senate, but for fewer years than in the past. At the same time, it received a mandate to hire a senior director to infuse new direc-tion, and it was given funding for a Humanities Center workshop and postdoctoral fellowships.

The medicine worked, and things were turned

around, most noticeably with the hire of Shelley Fisher Fishkin as faculty program director.

Though the program today exudes excitement, “the doubts will never be put to rest, and that’s a good thing,” said Saldívar, the Hoagland Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. “We must always be self-critical. American studies needed to be examined very closely back then, and the new leader-ship was crucial.”

Fishkin, an internationally acclaimed scholar of Mark Twain, started things off with a bang as soon as she arrived in the fall of 2003 by organizing confer-ences on the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Educa-tion and, for a change of pace, The Simpsons.

“Students all watched The Simpsons, of course, but they never watched it critically,” she said. “The notion that social criticism happens on TV wasn’t something they had ever really thought of.”

Controversy over the field comes with the territory, she suggested recently.

“Those criticisms [by the Faculty Senate] indicated a lack of consensus concerning American studies’ body of knowledge and the appropriate methodologies for dealing with that body of knowledge,” she said. “And American studies is nothing if not a continuing debate on those issues. Ever since the founding of this nation, people have debated over the definition of America.”

But, she cautioned, American studies is not for ev-eryone. “If someone wants a very clear definition, they should probably stay within a discipline. American studies has lots of unresolved challenges, and multiple methodologies are key.”

That multiplicity is what attracts undergraduates. An alumnus of the program who graduated in the 1980s remembered how much he loved his major be-cause, flipping through the course bulletin, he could take any class with the word “America” in its title.

“Undergraduates choose American studies because of its breadth,” Saldívar said. “Students love to ask big questions, and American studies allows them to do that.”

If there is controversy today—and where would aca-demia be without it?—it has nothing to do with the number of majors—which is higher than ever—or the quality of the teaching—Academic Council members are lining up to teach their courses, Fishkin and Saldí-var said.

Rather, it might have to do with the limitless possi-bilities of the transnational turn. Given that there is no corner of the world where the United States has not left an imprint, might that not mean that anything goes? Might that mean, say, that Mexican history becomes just an extension of U.S. history?

Absolutely not, Saldívar said. “Moving away from the specificity of a national history in a way that ne-gates that history is absolutely wrong. If you’re moving away from national identity, that’s wrong.”

Neither Mexican history nor U.S. history, then, can be seen in isolation from one another. Nothing, in fact, can be seen in isolation in today’s world.

Study abroad“As part of this larger paradigm shift,” Fishkin said,

“American studies encourages its majors to go abroad and to study foreign languages. Students are often surprised at how going abroad relates directly to their work here. It’s very exciting.”

She pointed to examples such as a 2006 honors

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

L.A. CICERO

Director Shelley Fisher Fishkin, credited

with turning the program around, is a

leading advocate of taking American stud-

ies global.

‘Whenever people with power act on visions

of America that rest on oversimplification, myth and a blind faith that America is always right – or, for that

matter, always wrong – that is a call to us as American studies scholars to do our

work,’ Fishkin said.

FALL 2007 7

thesis on Allen Ginsberg (sparked by Stanford’s ac-quisition of the poet’s papers), which took a student to Prague, where Ginsberg had moved in dissident cir-cles; or another student whose project on Chilean farm workers in the 19th-century U.S. Southwest took her to Chile; or senior Caley Anderson, who got a better sense of U.S. environmental management by studying similar issues in Australia.

“American studies was the only major in the entire bulletin that fi t what I wanted to get out of my Stan-ford education,” said Anderson, formerly a biology major. “American studies appealed to me because you could create your own concentration. I chose environ-mentalism.”

She found her calling, she said, in the late Jay Fliegelman’s course on American literature and cul-ture. An intern with the Environmental Protection Agency last summer, Anderson is now interested in communications and the environment.

Nationwide, too, the country’s most prestigious American studies departments and programs are re-quiring students, especially graduate students, to be profi cient in foreign languages. They collaborate with centers and programs in African American, Chicano, Asian American and Native American studies.

In her widely publicized November 2004 presiden-tial address to the ASA, Fishkin explicitly and power-fully addressed the transnational turn, calling it es-sential for overcoming the “nationalism, arrogance and Manichean oversimplifi cation” often attributed to Americans.

“Whenever people with power act on visions of America that rest on oversimplifi cation, myth and a blind faith that America is always right—or, for that matter, always wrong—that is a call to us as American studies scholars to do our work,” she said.

The work—combating stereotypes and simplifi ca-tions—leads one quickly to the realization that na-tional boundaries are not the most useful way of as-sessing cultures. “We are likely to focus less on the United States as a static and stable territory and popu-lation ... and more on the nation as a participant in a global fl ow of people, ideas, texts and products,” she went on to say.

Humanities Center workshopStanford does not have a PhD program in Ameri-

can studies, but the Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL) comes pretty close. MTL students often work as teaching assistants for American studies classes.

They also have been in charge of the occasional “American Cultures” workshop at the Humanities Center. That was the workshop encouraged by the Faculty Senate in 2001.

In 2006-07, it was called “American Cultures/Transnational American Studies.” The fall workshop addressed the interaction of Asian and Latino cultures in the United States; winter quarter was devoted to the transnational life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin; and spring brought speakers on anti-colonialism and attitudes in the Soviet Union toward black American writers.

One of the organizers of that workshop was Ste-ven Lee, an MTL student writing a dissertation com-paring multiculturalism in the Soviet Union and the United States, an obviously transnational theme. He cautioned, however, that in general “the celebration or fetishization of the transnational turn as something inherently innovative is a real risk.”

“The nation isn’t going anywhere anytime soon,”

he said. “There are specifi c contexts and histories that have to be respected.”

Lee was off to St. Petersburg, Russia, the follow-ing day to attend an American studies conference. His colleague and co-organizer of the Humanities Center workshop, Nigel Hatton, had spent the summer at similar meetings in Ireland, Denmark, England and the Czech Republic.

There are some Europeans who are skeptical about U.S. scholars imposing an American studies paradigm on the rest of the world, Hatton admitted, adding that “it will require a constant conversation.”

“Being in all those places certainly broadened my view,” he said, and that in large part is the point: to show Americans that the world, including the world of American studies, is larger than they thought.

Undergraduates are fi guring that out. To help them along, Fishkin has taught a 2-credit course to prepare students to attend a national ASA meeting. Hatton was the teaching assistant.

“The students were great,” he said. “They spent the quarter studying the conference program, fi guring out which sessions they wanted to attend and doing research on the speakers. They dressed well; they even made business cards. It was a great way to acclimate them to academia and to American studies. The class really spoke to the vibrancy of Stanford’s program.

“And they danced their heads off at the reception the closing night.”

Hatton and Lee furthermore are associate manag-ing editors of a brand-new publication, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, to be launched in 2008 by Stanford’s American studies program and the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Ameri-can Cultures and Global Contexts Center. Fishkin is a founding editor of the refereed journal, which will be offered online for free.

Making connectionsLest anyone think that the linkages between U.S.

and non-U.S. topics are forced, Fishkin offers exam-ples of how one thing leads to another.

During her presidential address to the ASA, she told her audience about 19th-century Scots oppressed by England who idealized American Indians struggling against the same enemy. One such Scot went by the name of Teyoninhokarawen, as he was half Mohawk and a chief in Canada; he fought the United States in 1812. He also translated the Bible and works by Sir Walter Scott into Mohawk to prepare the Indians for the white society that awaited them.

A story like that, she said, epitomizes a transna-tional vision that doesn’t hold much store by national boundaries and that can reshape our understanding of North American history and culture.

Even Mark Twain is not off-limits. Several years ago, Fishkin famously uncovered a play by Twain at UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library; the play, Is He Dead? opens on Broadway this autumn.

It turns out that Twain wrote it while living in Vi-enna in the 1890s (his daughter was studying music there), and he set it in 19th-century France. “So even Twain, that most American of American authors, had important links to non-U.S. cultures,” she said. Twain also was an early animal-rights advocate, and he shaped the movements both here and in Britain. So, yet another transnational story.

“I tell my students, even though it’s an oxymoron, stalk serendipity and keep an open mind,” Fishkin said. “And students fi nd it exciting to explore all the unexpected places their research can take them.”

MULTIDISCIPLINARY NEWS UPDATED AT http://mult i .stanford.edu

Graduate students Nigel Hatton, above,

and Steven Lee, below, organized

a Humanities Center workshop called

“American Cultures/Transnational Ameri-

can Studies.”

A new publication, The Journal of Transnational

American Studies, will be a focal point of the

growing field.

Do America, Do the World

JAN HAFNER

B Y A N N A R V I N

Breakthroughs in basic science are fun-damental to making major advances in human health. This equation sounds simple, but the path from an exciting basic laboratory discovery to a valuable practical application for the prevention or cure of human diseases has many barriers and wrong turns.

Nevertheless, the Stanford faculty and their students have made many remarkable contributions in the right direction along this daunting road. The Initiative on Human Health (IHH), a major focus of The Stanford Challenge fundraising campaign, aims to accelerate Stanford’s contributions to improving human health and well-being now and in the years to come.

Success in making fundamental scientific observa-tions and translating these observations into innova-tions that benefit human health is never one person’s achievement. The spark for the IHH is the recognition that building multidisciplinary research will determine what Stanford can do in helping people to live health-ier lives in the 21st century.

In medicine, many important scientific questions originate in the mind of the insightful physician at the bedside. At Stanford, the same physician has often re-turned to the laboratory to find new therapies, some-times with the help of researchers from other disci-plines. Consider the example of Dr. Henry Kaplan and Edward Ginzton at the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory who, together in the 1950s, developed an approach to radiation therapy that saved the life of a child with retinoblastoma in its first application.

The goal of the IHH is to make this tradition a cor-nerstone of health-related research at Stanford. Even more than in past decades, we recognize that major advances in medicine are likely to be the result of mul-tidisciplinary teams. The IHH goal is to offer our fac-ulty and students opportunities to do such work.

Imaging, invention, integrationThe IHH has identified three themes that define ar-

eas in which new research and training efforts could yield many benefits: imaging, seeing biological pro-cesses in ways that yield new therapies; invention, making tools that enhance research and devices that solve health problems; and integration, synthesizing the massive amounts of information emerging from vast databases related to human health.

• Imaging: Our modern knowledge about the human body began with the precise anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and others during the Renaissance. In the next iteration, microscopes were invented that re-vealed structures too small for the eye to see, laying the foundation for my field, microbiology and infectious diseases. Today, electron microscopes reveal cellular structures at the nanoscale and magnetic resonance im-aging has revolutionized clinicians’ ability to diagnose illness and treat patients. We are about to make another leap forward in imaging, equivalent to the change from a still photograph to a movie. The 21st-century ways of “seeing” will involve watching events happen on a cellular level in real time in tissues, organs and entire organisms. Researchers will be able to watch thousands of neurons as they fire in response to a stimulus, rather than being limited to observations about a single cell. Clinicians will engineer molecules that can hunt down diseased cells at their earliest stages and literally illu-minate them on a computer screen long before current methods would detect any signs of illness.

• Invention: New tools such as genetic sequencing and microarrays are changing the paradigm of health-related research. Instead of approaching a question with a preconceived hypothesis and testing it, research-ers derive insights from a comprehensive analysis of

the plethora of data produced with these tools. The pace of fundamental discovery science will accelerate accordingly. Scientists envision that devices used to do genetic and functional analyses of cells in the lab will become more powerful and less expensive, making it possible for clinicians to use them to obtain informa-tion about their patients’ susceptibility to diseases. Re-search at Stanford is also advancing the possibility of such inventions as artificial corneas, robotic surgical tools and chip implants in the brain to restore move-ment to quadriplegics.

• Integration: It might seem that scientists and phy-sicians will be overwhelmed by the deluge of infor-mation these new tools are creating. Fortunately, the opposite outcome is more likely. Researchers in the new field of biocomputation are defining methods to synthesize data about genes and proteins into models that explain how cells of many different types actually work. Social sciences research integrates information from whole populations to identify risks to health that may never have been suspected. Integration of com-plex data sets could allow health care to be tailored to the individual—taking into account our genetic inheritances, the bacteria and viruses that we carry, or the precise abnormalities of a cancerous cell, along with details of our personal medical histories, to de-sign preventive regimens or make rapid diagnoses and personalize treatments for each of us.

Fellowships and grantsThese and other advances in human health are now

inextricably linked to combining the clinical sciences with expertise from biological and physical sciences, computer science and engineering. More than ever, we need to train scientists and clinical investigators to master their own disciplines and to move comfort-ably across disciplines. The IHH will promote such educational opportunities for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows by establishing fellowships for 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 and teaching related to human health.

Strengthening multidisciplinary bioscience and medicine requires incentives. Faculty who propose research at the intersection of disciplines often have trouble attracting support from the government and foundations because they are moving into uncharted territory. The IHH will give such ideas a boost by pro-viding seed funds to projects that are judged by our faculty to be high risk but likely to have high impact if successful. This is a daunting task, but we already have a track record through Bio-X, the pioneering Stanford program to bridge the biosciences and the physical sci-ences. The Bio-X innovation grants awarded to mul-tidisciplinary research teams have yielded impressive results. The $700,000 in grants has paved the way for $70 million in government support. The IHH will provide broad support for research in basic biological/biomedical sciences and Bio-X, as well as target new programs in neurosciences, stem cell biology and re-generative medicine, and cancer.

Stanford is one of the few universities with such an ambitious agenda for multidisciplinary innovation in human health. In taking on this challenge, we are for-tunate to have our medical school on the same campus as the university’s six other schools. This facilitates face-to-face interactions between faculty and students with diverse expertise and with the clinical faculty at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

Through these interactions, we will build upon the remarkable advances in human health that have been achieved by the traditional medical disciplines. The IHH will serve as the catalyst for the next generation of innovators at Stanford to chart new directions in basic and translational health-related research.

8 FALL 2007

An ambitious agenda for health research

As dean and vice provost, Arvin over-

sees university research issues, interdis-

ciplinary initiatives and independent labs,

and the offices of Technology Licensing,

Environmental Health and Safety, Sexual

Harassment Policy and Research Compli-

ance.

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