Twenty-five years spent at UCLA, and what does Michael E. Phelps have to show for it?

Enough to fill the resumes of five people. Easily.

For this reason, Phelps - Norton Simon Professor and chair of the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology - seems a natural choice to deliver the 91st Faculty Research Lecture. He will discuss "Imaging the Living Biology of Our Bodies in Health and Disease" today at 3 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall.

The topic sounds complicated, but Phelps has a knack for making difficult concepts clear. "I've devoted my life to taking pictures (images)," he explained.

"In science, we collect data that are pieces of a puzzle we are trying to solve. Our goal is to assemble the whole puzzle to form a picture of how a molecule, a cell, an organ system or the galaxies are structured, and how they function."

As the inventor of the PET (positron emission tomography) scanner, Phelps has played a fundamental role in advancing that process. PET is a molecular imaging camera that produces images of the living biological processes in our bodies, both normal and diseased ones. The amazing thing about PET is that it inspects all organ systems to search for cancer and other diseases in a single examination.

Phelps has long been a crusader in the push to get PET scans covered by medical insurance companies, making appearances before Congress and the federal agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid to plead his case. As of July, he was able to obtain broad PET scan coverage for lung, head and neck, esophageal and colorectal cancers; lymphoma and melanoma; and cardiovascular disease and epilepsy. Next on his list: breast, ovarian, cervical and uterine cancers and Alzheimer's disease.

But while Phelps has his eye on the big picture, he also cares deeply for UCLA and his department. In 1990, when he became chair of the Department of Pharmacology - as it was called then - it had seven faculty members, six students and $1 million in research grants. Today, the department boasts 48 faculty, 61 graduate students, a total research budget of $35 million per year from grants and gifts, a Nobel Prize winner in Professor Louis Ignarro and two members of the National Academy of Sciences (including Phelps).

Most recently, Phelps founded the Los Angeles Tech Center in Culver City, a half-for-profit, half-nonprofit center that is partnering with the pharmaceutical industry to develop molecules as imaging probes for PET and as drugs.

Surprisingly, Phelps said that his greatest teachers were not academics. Rather, among his mentors was corporate executive Norton Simon, who taught Phelps there is a "natural curve" in life. "You go up, plateau and go down," Phelps said. "The only way to change that is to be continually starting new curves and, in this way, always be in the state of becoming."