The Rift Center will be built on land donated by both countries. Faculty from Cornell (on the informatics side) and Stanford (on the “wet” or traditional biology side) will collaborate with Israeli and Jordanian counterparts to build a library of genetic and ecological data on every living species on earth—a veritable Noah's Ark of biological information. Equally important, the project will bridge the sociopolitical rift in the volatile Middle East.

“The idea is actually one that Einstein once discussed, of trying to bring cooperation and peace with scientific collaboration,” notes Elber, who is slated to lead the so-called Library of Life. “It will have symbolic value in some sense, in breaking the fence [between the two countries]. The area will be defined as neutral land.”

Elber's stateside research attempts to bridge the rifts in our understanding of how life functions at extremely small and extremely fast scales of space and time. Trained as a physical chemist, he has made his mark in the computer modeling of life processes, such as the folding of protein molecules and the operations of tiny molecular channels that regulate cell function.

“Proteins are essentially the machines of life,” says Elber. “While you can get static pictures of them by experiment, if you want to understand how [say] a car is working, you want to see it function.” To this end, Elber has designed programs that streamline the process of figuring out how complex protein molecules “find” their functional shapes (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ron/movies.htm). Using procedures that automatically match sequences of proteins to their probable shapes, he has helped to find unsuspected evolutionary links, such as between a protein active in cell division both in the domestic tomato and in human cancers. ).

He has also helped fill in gaps in our understanding of how processes that take very little time on the molecular level—on the order of one quadrillionth of a second—can affect biological functions that unfold at timescales of whole seconds or minutes. Of the complexity of understanding protein dynamics, Elber notes with characteristic dryness, “I've been at it for fifteen years, and I'm not done yet.”