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University of Colorado President George Norlin took the lectern at East High School in Denver to ruminate on the meaning of life. It was 1927, a decade since the Americans had entered the “Great War.”

Hope, the president said, is an incurable attribute of human beings, and hope is nowhere better cultivated than at the university. Here, scholars devote their lives to the pursuit of discovery and innovation.

“Love of truth, a passion to know for ourselves and to set that knowledge working to create a world more kindly, more beautiful and more hospitable to human beings—does not this give a zest and a meaning to our lives?”

This love of truth is still evident today among scholars and researchers across our campus. Consider just two examples:

Hubert Yin says he was a bona fide “science nerd” in high school. He thought the epitome of cool was biochemistry.

It was the only science that could explain life at the molecular level, he felt. In biochemistry was truth and beauty, beauty in truth. Now, Yin is an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the �鶹ӰԺ.

Yin seeks an elusive answer to a critically important question: How, exactly, does the Epstein-Barr virus “knock on the door” of a human cell membrane?

The virus has been known to cause cancer since 1964, and it is found in 95 percent of humans. But scientists do not yet know the mechanism by which the virus enters the cell. Once it enters, the virus hijacks the cells’ normal functioning.

Yin is tackling this problem in a collaborative effort involving massively complex computer simulations of the Latent Membrane Protein, which has an inflammatory response to the virus.

Working with fellow CU Biofrontiers Institute faculty member Natalie Ahn and CU-�鶹ӰԺ biologist Jennifer Martin, Yin is striving to predict how that protein will react to potential drugs.

The task is monumental.

“Trying to achieve something that took nature millions of years to develop is an outstanding intellectual challenge,” says Yin. “And multidisciplinary approaches are the means we must take to approach this problem.” (Read more about his work .)

Matt Sponheimer, meanwhile, is an associate professor of anthropology who has helped increase human understanding of what ancient hominins ate. Research on ancient hominin diet, he notes, is the study of “how we became us.”

Using sophisticated analyses of dental microwear and carbon isotopes, Sponheimer is helping to clarify that picture.

Hominin anatomy gives clues to ancient diets. Paranthropus boisei, for instance, had huge jaws, big teeth, and massive muscles of mastication. This led to the idea that Paranthropus boisei ate hard foods like nuts and seeds along with low-nutrient, high-fiber foods—stuff that required a lot of chewing.

However, a steadily growing volume of data indicates that hominin anatomy tells us only what they were able to eat, not necessarily what they did eat. This year, Sponheimer was part of a team of researchers that found Paranthropus boisei, nicknamed “Nutcracker Man,” probably didn’t eat nuts. Instead, the hominin predominantly ate tropical grasses or sedges.

“Nutcracker Man’s” diet was almost the same as that of ancient zebras, pigs, warthogs and hippos, the National Science Foundation, which sponsored the research, reported.

Sponheimer, who churns out colorful phrases as routinely as important journal articles, put it this way: “Frankly, we didn’t expect to find the primate equivalent of a cow dangling from a remote twig of our family tree.”

As Discover magazine put it, “Our ancient cousin ‘Nutracker Man’ actually ate like a cow.”

Sponheimer says these findings were unexpected. “But this is one of the fun things about science—nature frequently reminds us that there is much we don’t yet understand.” (Read more about his work .)

I recount these examples because they encapsulate “discovery and innovation,” one of the “four pillars of excellence and impact” the university is highlighting during its comprehensive fund-raising campaign, called .

“Discovery and innovation” is a slogan, but one with underlying substance. It aptly describes the work of colleagues like Hubert Yin and Matt Sponheimer.

Among CU-�鶹ӰԺ faculty members, Yin and Sponheimer are outstanding. They are not unique. Across the campus and throughout disciplines ranging from the natural sciences to the social sciences and the arts and humanities, our scholars and researchers are constantly enlarging the scope of what we know.

Like the scholars of Norlin’s day, they show a profound love of truth, a real passion to enlarge human knowledge to create a world “more kindly, more beautiful and more hospitable to human beings.”

Making intellectual strides in the world of today, they inspire hope for the challenges of tomorrow. In the academic world, there can be no higher praise.

Todd Gleeson, professor in the department of integrative physiology, was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at CU �鶹ӰԺ from 2002 to 2012.