The new Pride Hall building at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), is meant to provide a safer, more modern research environment, but it has instead become a source of frustration for many of the school’s scientists. They say the space cannot support even one-third of the 880 employees expected to move there, and some of the affected lab heads are finding themselves forced to contemplate laying off staff, forfeiting research grants, or leaving the university altogether.
John Chorba, a physician-scientist whose chemical biology lab is currently at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus about 3 kilometers away from Pride Hall, is among the affected. “I’m being asked to move my lab … away from the equipment I use, the people that I need, and honestly what I need to do the chemistry safely,” he says. “A move like this will basically make me nonproductive, and that will end my career. … The most likely outcome is that I have to leave.”
Other affected researchers, who are hoping the situation can be resolved without leaving the institution and would only speak to Science on the condition of anonymity, have similar concerns. “If we move, it will gut my research program,” says one early-career lab head who is scheduled to relocate to Pride Hall later this month. The space she has been given can only hold half of her equipment, and she will have to double- or triple-up researchers on benches or start to let lab members go. Another faculty member, who has been at the university for several decades, says he is now being offered one-third of the space he needs. “There’s no question that a move will be detrimental,” he says.
Battles over lab space allocation are not uncommon in academia, and Pride Hall was born out of good intentions. Many labs relocating there are currently based in city-owned buildings at San Francisco General Hospital that were deemed seismologically unsound. Beyond structural integrity concerns, the buildings had long been in need of other repairs, researchers say. So UCSF decided to return them to the city and construct the new facility; Pride Hall began welcoming its first occupants in July.
But Pride Hall was designed without enough input from the scientists intended to work there and it lacks adequate bench space, desks, and storage, UCSF researchers say. In March, several dozen faculty, staff, and students appealed directly to UCSF leadership, including the chancellor and the dean of the School of Medicine, asking officials in a letter to “please hear us when we describe the details of what our labs need in order to continue to be successful.”
The researchers who spoke to Science say they fear that going forward with the move as currently planned would force them to either forfeit their existing grants, as they would no longer have the space and resources necessary to carry out the promised work, or commit research misconduct by deceiving funders about their capabilities.
The university is working to address researchers’ concerns, acknowledging that some groups will need additional accommodations, a UCSF spokesperson tells Science. “This includes conducting a thorough review of their lab needs … and an analysis of the obligations of federal grants,” the spokesperson says, adding “we have successfully identified strategies to address investigators’ specific needs and fulfill our obligations as a recipient of federal funds.”
But scientists share that they’re being asked to move before the space issues are dealt with, leaving them in an awkward position. The university, they say, is now looking into renting commercial space near its Mission Bay campus as a way to spread the labs out.
Heather Pierce, senior director of science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, notes that it’s a constant struggle for institutions to pursue their research needs in a way that is financially feasible, especially in expensive regions like the Bay Area. “The pressures on academic institutions to determine how to advance scientific knowledge, always substantial, are exacerbated by uncertainty in federal funding levels and new infrastructure needs for cutting edge research,” Pierce says. “As they work to support and respond to varied faculty needs, institutions are responding to those pressures as best they can.”
For those affected, however, the experience has made them feel less like valued members of the UCSF community and more like agitators creating trouble for administrators. “No one who’s a bench researcher at UCSF has experienced something like this, where the space you have to move into is so inadequate,” the early-career scientist says. “As a newer [principal investigator], it’s devastating.”
