ATHENS, Ga. - Five years after the sudden death of U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell, a 140,000-square-foot science building named after him is nearing completion on the University of Georgia campus.

What has impressed visitors to the building as much as anything else is its basement, which will be home to as many as 40,000 rodents. But Harry Dailey says the Paul D. Coverdell Building for Biomedical and Health Sciences is going to do a lot more than house rats and memorialize the late Republican senator.

It actually could help transform the way scientific research is carried out on the UGA campus, said Dr. Dailey, the director of UGA's 4-year-old Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute, one of the academic units that will occupy the building sometime after mid-January.

Some buildings are unique for the kinds of equipment they hold or the specialized research that can be conducted in them, but in some ways the Coverdell Building is the opposite.

Most labs on the UGA campus are the domain of one researcher, but the Coverdell Building's "flex-labs" are designed so researchers from a variety of research disciplines can work together, Dr. Dailey said.

Increasingly, federal agencies are handing out grants to research teams rather than individuals, and the Coverdell Building is designed to promote that kind of interdisciplinary interaction, he said - not just in the shared lab space, but also with alcoves and even lounge areas that should promote informal talk among researchers.

Some older faculty members, used to having their own labs, are skeptical of the idea, Dr. Dailey said, but many younger faculty have seen similar set-ups when they were in school and are more open to the idea.

"It will probably be a model for future buildings," he said.

The Coverdell Building will have some specialized equipment, however. One part - really an annex - will house a magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI, and other imaging equipment that scientists can use to peer inside animal bodies.