Steve Kay became dean of the Division of Biological Sciences on September 17. But he is already intimately familiar with the campus, having served for many years as an adjunct professor in UCSD's department of psychiatry and collaborated with UCSD biologists as a faculty member at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).
 
A pioneer in the biology of circadian rhythms, Kay was formerly a professor of cell biology at TSRI, chair of its department of biochemistry and director of its Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases, where he worked from 1996 to 2007. He’s also familiar with the needs of research enterprises on the Torrey Pines Mesa.

Kay sees the opportunities for growth and collaboration for UCSD and the other research institutions on the Torrey Mesa in large scale-research projects involving global health, the environment and energy, such as biofuels.  In this interview he talks about his new role as a dean, his research and the future of biology.

Kay: I became interested in biology as a young child, primarily because I grew up on a small island in the English Channel that had 40-foot tides. Many of my family members were commercial fisherman, and I spent a lot of time on commercial lobster boats. I was also influenced by an elementary school teacher who brought a microscope into class – I spent hours looking at bugs and pond water through that instrument. I was sold on a career as a biologist before I entered my teens.

Kay: I want to make sure the Division of Biological Sciences plays a transforming role in improving global health, economy and environment. That is our core mission, our responsibility, in research and education. The division, with its research and education activities, can be a real agent for change in those three areas.

Kay: What I would say to a parent, first and foremost, is that we are preparing our students to face the challenges of emerging and future job markets. The marketplace is changing at a remarkable pace, and we wish to equip our students with the best possible tools to be successful leaders and participants in these new economies. Equally important is the quality of our leadership at UCSD. Having a world-renowned scientist like Marye Anne Fox as chancellor really makes a difference. The leadership sets the bar for the whole organization. We also have a great reputation as a research institution, especially given our age. Youth is our strength. We’re a young institution and because of that all of our schools have grown in parallel. We have an incredible reputation for interdisciplinary research and that philosophy of easily working across disciplines is exactly what we want to see in the young people we turn out to society – someone who is familiar with social science, politics, with language and the arts, and the type of biology education that students can get here.

Also, the educational experience students get from being on the Torrey Pines mesa is incredible. This has become one of the premier areas for science in the world – 29,000 people are involved in biomedical research every day within a four-mile radius of UCSD. Our students benefit from our neighbor institutions with whom we partner and that provides the kind of scientific diversity that’s very beneficial to our students.

Kay: Biology impacts so many aspects of our lives, it is difficult to single out only one issue. At the top of my list would be that biologists have a huge responsibility to help the public understand the pace of discovery, and how our view of living systems is changing rapidly – from molecules to man. In return, I would like to ask for an appreciation of the critical role of robust funding for the basic sciences – which provides the foundation for mission-oriented improvements in health, agriculture and the environment. We must ensure our students appreciate this ‘big bang’ in biology, and how it impacts their preparation for the job market.

Kay: The challenge for biologists is to become comfortable with mathematical tools. We have to be comfortable with biology becoming a predictive science. We need to move between theory and practice in the same way that physicists do. The reason, simply put, is that we’ll never have enough money, no matter how generous the taxpayers are, to do all of the experiments we want to do in order to understand how cells do what they do.

There’s been a ‘biological big bang’ where we’ve suddenly discovered that there’s all of this stuff we didn’t recognize as genes before, these so called small RNAs that have all of these effects that we’re only just beginning to figure out. So all of a sudden the genome has become bigger and we need to understand now what a genome is. That will be a real challenge for biology.

Kay: We’ll need to be able to use mathematical and computational tools to limit the best experiments to do. For biologists that’s one of the biggest challenges because it means we’re going to have to train a whole new era of biologists who are very comfortable with math as a language. Carolus Linneaus and his students had to be very good at Latin so they could do all of this fantastic taxonomy. Our students are going to have to be very comfortable with discrete versus continuous functions, deterministic versus stochastic models, non-linear math and non-parametric statistics. This is a whole new world and we’re going to have to make sure a good proportion of our students are as comfortable with that language as Linneaus’ students were with Latin.

Kay: I’ve had a great time at TSRI. It’s an exhilarating organization. But it has a real focus. Like any private research institute, it can only become so large. And what has really attracted me about becoming the dean of the Division of Biological Sciences here is the stage we have to improve society both through research and education. At TSRI, we have a very high-quality graduate program, but we really have no opportunities for undergraduate education. And as a scientist I’m concerned about how well we’re educating the public about science and science issues. We live in an age of biology and, in particular, in an age of big biology in which large programs like the human genome have meant that in a few years you and I will be able to have our genomes sequenced. What’s the consequence of that? How is it going to affect our health care? How is it going to affect our privacy? I’m interested in continuing what I’ve done best, which is to help build and initiate research enterprises. Coming to UCSD provides a bigger stage for outreach to the community and this incredibly important education mission we have here.

Kay: I want us to explore multi-media channels to push the message out that science is exciting, that we need to understand it, that scientists aren’t weird or intimidating, that we’re normal people, we surf, we raise our kids and we go to work. What I want to make sure is that we use all of the modern media tools that are available to us to get the message out that biology surrounds us all, it impacts our lives in every way. We have to appeal to the natural scientist that’s inside all of us. There are genes inside of all of us presumably for survival that make us interested in natural history, make us interested in ourselves: What are we made up of? Where did we come from? And it’s that natural historian we need to wake up in the public and essentially get the public excited about what we’re doing.

Kay: The more we learn about who we are and where we came from, the more we have a responsibility to help people understand and cope with that. We have to face the fact that a large proportion of people within 10 years will be able to afford to have their whole genome sequenced. What is the impact of that for any one individual? Do you really want to know? Do you want to know what your susceptibility to specific genetic diseases might be before we have cures? These are enormous challenges for society. We’re in the age of big biology. We’ve gone through these big bangs in biology — recombinant DNA, sequencing of the human genome, the discovery of small RNAs — and it’s never been a more exciting time to be a biologist. We are in such an incredible era of understanding the beauty of how cells work. But there’s also a real responsibility. The more we learn, the better we’re going to have to be at transmitting what we’re learning to the general public.

We have some real challenges ahead for us to make science palatable, to make it interesting. We need to make more efforts to unlock the natural historian that lies in all of us. We want our students to be science literate and we want them to have some communications skills when then leave here so they can participate in educating people about this modern biological revolution.

Kay: Our laboratory studies circadian rhythms. Every organism has circadian rhythms. We, as humans, are aware of them when we get on a plane and experience jet lag, because our internal biological clock controls everything from when we get hungry to how well we perform. We know this when our blood pressure and sleep-wake cycle becomes out of synch with the outside world. These circadian rhythms impact many different processes and our lab studies how clocks are built inside of cells and how they are used in different organisms. We’re particularly interested in how clocks are built in animal liver cells, because our cholesterol metabolism is strongly regulated by biological clocks, as is the manner by which we metabolize glucose. So we’re very interested in how clocks fit in with homeostasis, which is of interest to researchers here who study diabetes, obesity and other diseases. We also have a strong interest in drug discovery for sleep disorders as well.

We also study clocks in plants. In plants and algae, clocks control almost everything. They control the capacity to photosynthesize and make molecules, many of which we are now interested in for biofuels. Plants even grow rhythmically. If you go to the south and pull up a lawn chair in the middle of a field of sorghum, you’ll actually hear the sorghum growing at night, because sorghum only grows at night and can actually grow centimeters in one night. And as it grows it makes a noise, so you really can hear the corn grow.