Senior Jenny Kung got a taste of that this past summer during an internship with the San Carlos, Calif., firm GeneMachines, which makes robotic machines that prepare samples for gene sequencers. You can't just be a biology major anymore. As a result, she's taking computer programming classes in her last year at Cal to help prepare for a job in the biotechnology field. UC Berkeley professors saw this coming. This is a major shift in what biologists are doing.
Teaching is a big part of the mix.
Students, both undergraduate and graduate, will benefit from the interactions among laboratories and already are being encouraged to take courses in disciplines outside their own. Gary Firestone, who invited a persistent Kung to join his lab when she was just a sophomore, says serious discussions are going on now about creating undergraduate majors in health sciences or biophysics to make interdisciplinary work an integral part of a student's education. A professor of cell and developmental biology and head of the Undergraduate Affairs Committee in the ever-growing Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Firestone has been a big booster of undergraduate research. Half the papers I've published in the last 10 to 15 years have had undergraduates as coauthors. Most of the new support for teaching is aimed at graduate students, however.