[Music]
[MOORE] Being at the Beckman Institute has definitely been a stimulation intellectually for me.
It has exposed me to a lot of different research ideas that I would have never
encountered if I had stayed strictly in my home department.
[Wiltzius] What we really try to do is bring people from various different backgrounds and bring
them together here in the same building. There is a new quality that happens when
you bring people together and they have to actually rub shoulders.
They run into each other and you have the serendipity of the conversation that
all of a sudden opens up something new. That's something that we are very, very lucky to
have here in the form of this beautiful Beckman Institute.
[Kramer] Often the projects that we are involved in are really bigger than any single domain.
And it allows us to encourage collaboration and support interdisciplinary
and multidisciplinary projects that really should be attacked from different disciplines.
[BROWN] I'm Ted Brown. I was the founding director of the Beckman Institute
here at Illinois. I had been a professor of chemistry and in
administration at that time. And, in the course of that work,
I was one of the principal figures in developing the proposal to Arnold and Mabel
Beckman for the Beckman Institute.
The problem with most university structures, and certainly every one that I knew of at that time, was that
it was all organized along very hierarchical lines. You have departments, you have colleges,
and the boundaries between them are very large sometimes.
people in different departments have trouble collaborating, even though their interests may overlap.
The idea of interdisciplinary research wasn't very big at that time.
I mean, in fact, there were a lot of people who felt that you couldn't really do
good science if your were trying to do too much interdisciplinary stuff.
So we had to kind of overcome some obstacles of that sort.
A lot of it had to do with convincing department heads that was okay for their faculty to do this, and so on.
It was in 1983 and I organized a couple of committees of faculty members
and one of them was chaired by Bill Greenough, a psychology professor.
The other was chaired by Karl Hess, who was a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
We decided that we would see about putting together a very broadly-based,
multidisciplinary proposal to make it possible for people to jump these
intellectual boundaries. And we had help from people like Mort Weir
and others to try to conceptualize this thing.
That idea of making one place where all of these different disciplines can work on problems
which are really big, I mean things that nobody was doing at the time.
And you have to have people who dreams those big dreams.
And you also have to have a place where they can do them. So that was what we wanted to do.
For the design of the building, we knew what we had to do.
We had to have labs. We needed to have offices. And so on. But we wanted those to be designed
in such a way as to promote interactions. So we have big spaces where we put
graduate students in these open office spaces. The faculty offices are all in a
row and they have to go somewhere else to talk to their students.
The bridges... we had tables on those bridges...
...the cafeteria... so it promoted interactions...
especially among the students and among the postdocs, you know.
Those are the people you want to talk to one another.
The money was granted by Arnold Beckman in 1985. There was a formal groundbreaking in
the fall of 1986. And we were done building at the end of 1989.
The great thing about Arnold was that he was willing to take a chance on this thing.
I mean, this was not business as usual. You know, we were planning to have all kinds of
things in there that weren't the kind of science he was familiar with:
psychology, linguistics, behavioral sciences. But he saw that there was a coherence to this whole thing.
And he had the imagination and the vision to say,
"You know, if these guys can pull this off, this could really be great."
[GRAY] That was when the Beckman Institute was born; out of those
discussions between Ted Brown and Arnold Beckman... which has changed the whole landscape in
terms of biomedical research, energy research, environmental research,
all the big-ticket items now have benefited from this move towards interdisciplinary work.
And that happened here at the Beckman Institute.
[DORRANCE] He set the stage for the Beckman Institute. And it is today
what it is today because of Ted Brown.
[BROWN] And I want to say too, I think, you know, I'm just a representative. I mean, Bill Greenough and Karl Hess
and how many other faculty members put their hearts and souls into this thing?
I was just, you know, the guy who waved the wand a little bit and these guys did all the work.
So if it could come to this happy conclusion, then all the better.