William J. Rutter is the Moses of Mission Bay, declares Lloyd H. "Holly" Smith, MD, former chair of the Department of Medicine and associate dean of the UCSF School of Medicine. "Rutter’s vision has brought the children of Parnassus Heights to this promised land," he says.

The community center at UCSF Mission Bay was named the William J. Rutter Center in November in honor of this exceptional academic leader, who brought national recognition to the University and chartered a new course for the scientific community.

Rutter came to UCSF in 1968 as chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics. At that time UCSF was not nationally recognized as the scientific leader it is today. Several candidates had turned down the position. But Smith and then dean Stuart Cullen courted Rutter, who became convinced that the opportunity would enable him to advance science. He was right.

"Rutter took what was then rather a sleepy enterprise in most of the disciplines of modern medical science," says Smith, "and transformed this community over the course of the next decade."

Rutter believed that in order for basic science to contribute to medicine and human lives, there had to be a free flow of information. "The culture we developed here was one where students, post docs and faculty cooperated to move projects and programs ahead," Rutter says. "We became a community instead of an isolated group of researchers."

"This high interactivity of the scientific community is characteristic of UCSF," confirms Smith. "It has been famed around the country."

Under Rutter’s watch, the basic patent for recombinant DNA was acquired by UCSF based on the work of Herbert Boyer, and Rutter’s own lab was the first to clone the insulin gene and develop the process for making a vaccine against the Hepatitis B virus.

In 1981 he founded the biotechnology company Chiron, which actually developed the vaccine for Hepatitis B, first sequenced the HIV genome, sequenced and cloned the Hepatitis C virus, and developed the process to manufacture human insulin. Chiron was acquired by Novartis in 2005.

Throughout his tenure, Rutter knew UCSF needed to expand to continue fostering collaborative research in rapidly expanding scientific disciplines. He organized the Bay Area Life Sciences Alliance (BALSA), a group of San Francisco Bay Area leaders dedicated to building a more effective community for science at UCSF. It was BALSA that convinced the City of San Francisco and the land company developing Mission Bay to donate 43 acres to UCSF.

Now the building that anchors Mission Bay is named for Rutter in recognition of his major intellectual contributions to UCSF research and financial support for building the Mission Bay campus. The California Foundation for Molecular Biology, created and funded by Rutter, has made several major donations to UCSF, now totaling
$25 million.

"I regard this naming with a certain degree of humility because it is not really about me," says Rutter. "My contributions have been amplified many times by my colleagues. For me, the center symbolizes the UCSF community, which has become one of the great centers for biomedical research and innovation in the world. I am immensely proud to be part of that community."

The William J. Rutter Center at UCSF Mission Bay was designed by his friend Ricardo Legorreta, who also designed the corporate laboratories at Chiron.