The fall of Stanley Hall

09 April 2003

Peg Skorpinski photo

Demolition of the half-century-old former Biochemistry and Virus Laboratory Building — subsequently renamed for Wendell Stanley, the late Nobel Prize winner who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1948 — shifted into high gear on April 3 when colorfully nicknamed pieces of construction equipment started taking massive bites out of it. When the crunchers, peckers, and other huge devices have finished their work, a brand-new building will rise on the same site: a seismically safe structure that will become the UC Berkeley center of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research — aka QB3.

The new building will also house a special laboratory, an innovative Bio-Nano Center, for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). Both QB3 and CITRIS were launched in 2000 as part of Governor Davis’s California Institutes of Sciences and Innovation.

The new Stanley Hall — slated for completion in 2006 — will contain some 40 laboratories housing faculty on the cutting edge of bioscience resarch, investigating areas such as imaging, structural biology, computational and theoretical biology, and tissue engineering. The total budget for the project (more properly named the Stanley Biosciences and Bioengineering Facility) is about $162 million, a combination of state and private funds designated in 2000.