Although some lucky life scientists work in "designer labs," pictures of which grace architectural magazines and Web sites, most do assays off carts or share four-foot-long benches with two other colleagues. Cramped, makeshift labs are practically a tradition at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Despite this, both institutions can claim their share of Nobel laureates, UCSF having garnered three of the prizes in the past 10 years. The impact of lab design on scientific productivity is hard to measure, but today there is clearly a trend toward spending an extra 20 to 30 percent of the construction budget on "architectural" facilities.

Commenting on the growing choice of designer labs over purely functional spaces with benches and four walls, Richard Kalish, senior associate at Earl Walls Associates, lab design consultants, says that over the past ten to twelve years, many new labs at diverse institutions have "started to open up." "Open up" means, in terms of policy, that the leaders who shape architectural programs - the architects, chief financial officers, chancellors, and principal investigators (PIs) - are thinking about lab space in new ways. These planners are moved primarily by economic and technological imperatives. Universities want attractive research environments in order to recruit talented students and keep productive faculty, who in turn bring prestige and grant money. Enticing 10 postdocs to work for her was one reason basic science researcher Nancy Lee, of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, rebuilt her labs.

On a grander scale, with the future of his crowded, 81-year-old institution at stake, UCSF chancellor J. Michael Bishop expanded his task force from 20 to 44 faculty members to reach a consensus on how to "reconfigure" the university. Their answer was a new campus for broad-based research, 2.65 million gross square feet on 43 acres called "UCSF Mission Bay." The first building is Building 24 - Genentech Hall.

Similarly, corporations are building new research facilities not only to promote the transfer of technology from bench to market (and thereby capture some of the $20 billion in annual biotech sales), but also to showcase a new research center to potential investors. For example, Chiron Corporation of Emeryville, Calif., built its Chiron Life Sciences Center in part so that corporate communications officers could easily show off the white coats on the upper research floors to financial analysts on the ground floor of the six-floor-high atrium.

Corporations and universities are also driven to build designer labs by a technological imperative. Many are grappling with strategic plans to functionally map the human genome and characterize all its key proteins, dubbed the proteome. These institutions need the space to house a variety of complementary technologies to help find new targets for drugs to fight human diseases. Already, the Chiron Life Sciences Center, Genentech's Founders Research Center, and the Beckman Center in La Jolla sport tissue culture suites, darkrooms, hot rooms, cold rooms, computer labs, and animal facilities just a pipette-tip ejection's distance away from the lab. To be sure, at some new facilities, like the University of California at Davis Genome and Biomedical Sciences facility, now under design, biomedical engineers will work in labs with more walls and privacy than has been seen in most designer labs. According to Katherine Ferrara, professor and chair of the division of biomedical engineering, who serves on the UC Davis building committee, this is the most efficient lab design for bioengineers.

But universities and corporations so value the economic and technological advantages that state-of-the-art labs can provide, they are reaching a consensus on lab design. The growing appreciation of the aesthetic factor in lab design in academia and industry could well influence how life scientists perform their research and with whom. The differences between corporate and academic lab designs are blurring. Peter Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the history of science and of physics at Harvard and coeditor of The Architecture of Science, says institutions are relying on architects' use of "standardized modules" (to scientists, the "bay") as a unit to be repeated throughout an architectural plan. The module typically contains a set of benches, usually for four to six lab workers, desks, if any, at the benches, and a system of supporting utilities like water, vacuum, gases, and electricity. Exploiting the module, architects design "generic" labs that can be slotted in anywhere in the shell of a new research building. This strategy is becoming a fixture of institutional lab design.

In agreement with Walls' Kalish, Srecko Diminic, senior project architect at Gordon H. Chong & Partners, says the module concept has been around for about 15 years. Before that, he observes, "built-in" benches with built-in utilities were the norm. "The lab casework within a module is all modular, with many of the units constructed as movable tables," says Bill Diefenbach, A.I.A., senior vice president and principal-in-charge of the UCSF Mission Bay Project at the architectural firm SmithGroup. The spine behind the movable tables will hold the utilities for the benches. They "will usually remain as changes are made to the casework in front," adds Diefenbach. In fact, Earl Walls, the lab-design consultant whose company programmed the labs at UCSF's Building 24, pioneered so-called interstitial ceilings that house most of the utilities above the heads of scientists so that it is much easier to phase out labs as needed. This means labs can be "plastic." "Walls are avoided," says Diefenbach, "because they are the least flexible." The spacious labs at the Chiron Life Science Center can hold 12 to 18 people, while UCSF Mission Bay labs will hold 24 to 32 researchers. Benches at Chiron and at UCSF either are home to researchers or are dedicated stations for specialized equipment. As research programs flourish or fade, large wall-less labs fill up or disappear. In academia, bench space for PIs often expands or contracts in proportion to their funding. With their potential for being converted to office space or vacated, generic modular, open-space labs are fast becoming the currency of institutional economics and research priorities. Diminic wonders how much of this touted flexibility is actually exploited. After all, he notes, the gas and water utilities for all of those modules would have to be capped for office space - at a price.

The fate of flexible, modular labs may be uncertain, but the vision of lab planners is clearer. And kitchens may be part of that vision. Vicky Kirby is the lab manager for Keith Yamamoto, professor and chair of cellular and molecular pharmacology (CMP) at UCSF. Kirby presides over Yamamoto's remodeled lab in the towering Health Sciences West tower on the old campus. The lab occupies half the space of a larger research area; the other half is used by another PI. The rebuilt CMP department includes a second wing of lab space for two other PIs. The redesigned departmental lab space was a pilot design to test the Building 24 plan. Kirby enthusiastically endorses one design element of the lab - an interactive area that not only serves as a conduit between the two big lab spaces, but also accommodates lab support and the offices of the four PIs. The postdocs and grad students who spend endless hours there call the interactive area "the kitchen," where no birthday goes uncelebrated. "The kitchen," says Kirby, "promotes a lot of cross-fertilization among the four groups."

In newer corporate research facilities, interactive areas are the norm. "Fellows' Areas" bridge east and west lab wings on floors three through five of Chiron's Life Sciences Center. At Genentech, brightly lit nooks under windows invite "informal, incidental conversations." This mingling is one component of "joint research programs, . . . collaborative experiments [and] joint meetings of research groups" that make for dynamic interaction among researchers in a well-planned lab space, Yamamoto says. "Architecture can promote these possibilities," echoes Diefenbach, "by providing multi-use casual spaces at the confluence of natural paths of travel within a lab." This is one reason the "kitchen," like the one in CMP, will be repeated in three corners of Building 24. Even the idea of the "spine," which will be a conduit for free-standing utilities in the Mission Bay lab benches, will manifest itself in an east-west spine that will run through Building 24. It will be a channel for interaction, with all kinds of lab activities around it. The designers believe this should promote unexpected and fruitful collaboration among researchers.

Harvard science historian Galison observes that lab designers are also trying to create spaces that can accommodate different kinds of work. Labs that house both computers for genomics and instrumentation for high-throughput screening are likely to be more productive than separate facilities. Lab design consultant Kalish says one investigator wanted combinatorial chemistry, computer lab, imaging station, clean room, and molecular biology areas all in a single lab. The implications of an interdisciplinary lab space are both exciting and, potentially, profound. "We are seeing some very strong ties between corporations and academic research," says Kalish. It's not at the point where universities and corporations are sharing the same building, he says, but some universities are providing "core facilities" as "incubators" to spawn future biotech companies. Corporations, in turn, often accommodate visiting academics in their labs. To both parties, it makes good architectural sense to plan their lab space the same way and close by for convenient institutional collaboration.

Collaboration may just happen at the Mission Bay campus. UCSF's Building 24, to be completed by late next year, will be "across the street" from a million square feet of developed biotech lab space. "The next lab at UCSF's Mission Bay in collaboration with UCB [University of California at Berkeley] and UCSC [University of California at Santa Cruz] will be the 'Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research' - QB3," says Diefenbach. Yamamoto not only chairs CMP, he also chairs the UCSF Mission Bay Task Force and is a member of the jury over the architectural plans. He is confident that the objectives of corporate profit and academic freedom can be reconciled at Mission Bay. The university and biotech buildings on the campus will be tied by a common architectural vision and technology transfer program designed to generate income for ongoing research at UCSF. Still, "we hope to foster sharing of physical and intellectual resources, to exploit to the advantage of both sides the advantageous features of each, while respecting the differences in goals, approaches and priorities," says Yamamoto. When the proper guidelines and committees are in place, scientists should be assured of their own space.