Remembering David

 

Sacramento, May 2022

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I first had the opportunity to work with David in the Summer of 1999.  At that time four founding faculty were hired to create the Masters of Bioscience (MBS) curriculum for a new academic institution, the Keck Graduate Institute.  Hank Riggs was the founding president and David Galas was the Chief Academic Officer.  Four of us came on board that summer, David Wild (structural biology), Chen-Chen Kan (drug discovery), Jim Cregg (cell biology) and me (biophysical chemistry).  We worked with David on a new curriculum for a new degree program.  We wanted to educate science and engineering students for management and leadership roles in the applied life science industry (pharmaceutical, medical device and medical diagnostics).  David led us through a series of “retreats”, usually held in a distinguished guest house in Claremont, to develop the curriculum that would later be known as a “professional science masters” degree.  Startups are uncommon in academia, yet here we were at a new institution creating a new type of degree.  It was a time that was both stimulating and daunting, as we knew that we had only one chance at this.  We laid out the basic structure for the program during that summer and throughout the coming years as other faculty began to join us- Jim Sterling in Engineering, Seth Parker in Pharmaceutical Development and David Finegold in Business.  The product of this work became the paradigm for the professional master’s program (PSM).  There are now over 400 PSMs in the country.

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It is during this curriculum development process that I got to know David and realize his great creativity and intellectual curiosity.  David loved ideas.  He would often stop by my office, not necessarily to talk about curriculum development, but rather to talk about a range of other things from the Genomic Revolution (it was 1999, the genome draft would come out a year later), to the impact of laboratory automation, to the role of computational biology on drug discovery and  occasionally to fundamental issues of physics (David’s PhD was in physics).  As I got to work with David longer, I slowly began to understand a little bit about how he thought and the source of his great creativity.

 

While David loved ideas, I believe that how he thought creatively about these ideas came from an abstraction that was based on images or perhaps imagery (which I define as visual symbolism).  A striking example of this was David’s approach to writing.  I had the great fortune of being involved on a writing project with David and another colleague that took place at the University of Washington’s writing retreat center based at Friday Harbor in the Puget Sound.  This remote and idyllic location was an ideal setting to come together and write over complex themes- in this case it was Systems Biology.  Over the course of our weeks at Friday Harbor, I became keenly aware of our differences in how we approach writing.  My approach, perhaps the most traditional, is to broadly outline the material and use the writing process to create the content.  So the creativity was in the writing of paragraphs.  Our colleague wrote excruciatingly detailed outlines.  So detailed that to create the final prose, all one needed to do is to convert the bullet points into sentences.  The creativity was in the outline itself.  On this occasion, David did something I never saw before.  He spent his time deciding what graphs and illustrations he wanted in the text.  He would collect these and then write to the images.  The creativity was in the selection and source of images.  To my mind, this revealed a lot about how David thought about things.  

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I have been fortunate to collaborate on a number of research projects with David.  One of my favorite projects was the one using graph theory to study the effect of gene duplication and amplification on genetic networks.  We were able to establish the behavior of a number of graph theoretical parameters that could provide a tool kit to analyzing genomic data to understand how gene amplification effects genetic networks.  Reflecting back over the years, it strikes me that the appeal of the project was that it was very image driven.  We would simulate these graphical networks and see how duplication effect the graph, a very visual manifestation of an idea.

 

As David got into the later stages of his career, he became more enthralled with the combination of graph theory and information theory.  He was very productive during this period and this was not “turn the crank” stuff that are simple variations on a theme.  Rather he produced a number of highly creative and abstract publications.  David worked through foundational issues associated with identifying the statistical significance of gene associations to a given phenotype.  A long time ago, David recognized the short falling of population genetic theory in the genomic era.  He sought to remedy this.  His approach was to seek fundamental information theoretical relationships to unpack the genetic associations and reveal genetic architecture.  This work was just beginning, and I suspect it will take years for people to catch up with it and advance it.

It seems just like yesterday when David stops by my office at KGI and we would go to the white board and starting writing all sorts of crazy equations.  I deeply valued my time with David and considered him as a mentor, colleague and friend.  

 

T. Gregory Dewey

President

Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science