It was a happening worthy of late-night TV host David Letterman. The audience of trustees, alumni, and faculty had just finished watching a short video, specially produced for the groundbreaking ceremony for the Life Sciences Technology Building (LSTB) on March 11 at Phillips Hall Auditorium. The last scene of the video showed six Cornell sweatshirt-clad students—with red shovels and buckets on a pile of earth on Alumni Field—leaping skywards and yelling, “Congratulations!”

From left: Richard Meier ’56, Life Sciences Technology Building architect; Leti McNeil ’05, government; Jennifer Zhao ’05, engineering; Peter Meinig, chairman of the Cornell Board of Trustees; Sanford Weill, chairman of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College; and Steve Hohwald ’07, engineering, celebrate at the indoor groundbreaking ceremony for the new life sciences building, in Phillips Hall, March 11.

At that instant, the same students echoed the word and rushed from the back of the hall wielding their shovels and earth-filled buckets, which they presented to the groundbreaking speakers, including renowned building architect Richard Meier ’56.

“Cornell’s first cross-campus groundbreaking,” exclaimed President Jeffrey Lehman, receiving his bucket of ceremonial soil.

The virtual midwinter groundbreaking for the gleaming white four-story structure—and the ebullient presentation of Alumni Field soil—was created to celebrate the final stages of planning for the LSTB, which will begin to rise on the western end of the field in May or June, with completion scheduled for August 2007. The $140 million facility, the university’s most ambitious building project yet, was described by Kraig Adler, vice provost for life sciences, as “the central capital element in the academic and economic leadership of Cornell.”

The new building will be the centerpiece of Cornell’s New Life Sciences Initiative (NLSI), a $600 million program involving seven colleges, hundreds of faculty members, and up to 60 departments in research across the biological, physical, engineering, computational, and social sciences. The LSTB will be home to the Cornell Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, as well as an incubator for start-up businesses.

New York state has provided $25 million to the building project, making the LSTB the largest life-science research facility in the state. It will be, said Lehman in opening the ceremony, a “building as large in scale and bold in design as the research to be conducted in it.”

Ceremony speakers stressed the importance of the new building and the NLSI to the university and beyond. “Connectivity is the key. NLSI and the LSTB are important for Cornell, Ithaca, and the world,” said Sanford I. Weill ’55, chairman of the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and a university trustee emeritus. The building and the program have “already propelled Cornell to the forefront of life sciences, which will help millions of lives in many ways,” said Peter Meinig, chairman of the Board of Trustees.

As Lehman noted, “Cornell’s revolutionary genius has always been in making connections across disciplines that no group or institution has done before.”

—Larry Klaes
Cornell News Service