Combining My Lab with Harley’s

Very rapidly Stanford got wind of this and suddenly Harley was a professor at Stanford. And he got lots of grants and the collaboration between Harley's lab that was filled with physicists, applied physicists, electrical engineers, chemists, and my lab that was filled with biochemists and developmental biologists and cell biologists and geneticists. We decided to do something unusual: we combined our labs. And we had sitting next to each other, a physicist next to a geneticist, a cell biologist next to an engineer. And our weekly group meetings were lessons in language. We were teaching each other how to talk to each other. And, ultimately, Harley sent his physicists and engineers to the Cold Spring Harbor courses so that they would understand and be able to build the strains that they needed for their modeling. My students, who also went to Cold Spring Harbor, but my students got to the point where they had Mathematica over their desks because they had to learn how to think analytically and physically. And at a group meeting, if a physicist was presenting her work, she had to present it in such a way that my cell biologist understood what was the basic algorithm behind what she was doing. It was an incredible time.

The Beginning of Bio-X

This was happening in multiple labs across Stanford. Jim Spudich's lab, just many, many labs. Steven Chu, a physicist who was doing more and more in the biological sciences. I could name several of us. And that started Bio-X at Stanford. And Bio-X is a huge multidisciplinary set of buildings, and it was grassroots. So, the interdisciplinary blooming at Stanford did not come from the top down, it came from what we were all doing in our laboratories. And to this day, it's how we are all doing the science that is dealing with the living world.

Lucy Shapiro (b. 1940, New York City) is a developmental biologist and Professor Emeritus of Developmental Biology at Stanford University where she has been a faculty member since 1989. She held the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research and served as director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. Dr. Shapiro’s lab has focused on studying Caulobacter crescentus, one of the simplest organisms that divides asymmetrically into different cell types, to uncover fundamental principles of developmental biology.

Dr. Shapiro received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in 1962, and her Ph.D. In Molecular Biology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1966. In 1986, Shapiro moved to the Columbia University School of Medicine as the first female chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Two years later, in 1989, Shapiro moved to Stanford University and founded the Department of Developmental Biology.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Shapiro became involved in policy work. She was invited to the White House to speak to President Bill Clinton and his Cabinet about the potential threats to the public posed by the increase in antibiotic resistance, emerging infectious diseases, and the possibility of bioterrorism. She then went on to serve as a scientific advisor to the Clinton administration and advisor on bioterrorism to the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, and to the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice during the George W. Bush administration.

In addition to her research, Dr. Shapiro co-founded the anti-infectives discovery company Anacor Pharmaceuticals to develop new types of antibiotics and antifungals. This has resulted in the production of two FDA approved drugs; Kerydin, a treatment for toenail fungus and Crisaborole, to treat atopic dermatitis. Anacor Pharmaceuticals was acquired by Pfizer in May 2016. She also co-founded Boragen, an agricultural innovation company that merged with AgriMetis to form 5Metis, Inc, where she serves on the board. She also serves on the board of directors at GlaxoSmithKline and Pacific BioSciences, Inc.

Dr. Shapiro has received numerous awards including the National Medal of Science awarded by President Barack Obama, the Linus Pauling Medal, Dickson Prize in Science, Canada Gairdner International Award, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Excellence in Science Award, the Selman Waksman Award, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the Abbott Lifetime Achievement Award, the John Scott Award, and the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.