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Had they pulled off their scheme, there would be no Rice University.Ninety-nine years ago, two men forged the will of businessman William Marsh Rice, murdered him and were about to walk away with his millions.

They got caught, though, after Rice’s attorney, Capt. James A. Baker, helped uncover the crime and bring them to justice.

Rice had willed that his estate be used to create an institute of higher learning, and so it came to be. But imagine if the crime had gone undetected. How different would the world be if Rice University did not exist?

A mere 50 years after Rice opened on a muddy prairie, President John F. Kennedy came to announce the U.S. moon mission. Rice soon established the nation’s first space science department.

Rice, one of the world’s great universities, is the home of amazing discoveries. Rice scientists helped develop the first artificial heart and currently Rice bioengineers are manipulating tissues and cells with the hope of providing replacement organs and tissues grown from the human body itself.

A great university can change the world, and it can bring out the best in its people. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Larry McMurtry, who had a longtime presence at Rice as an undergraduate and graduate student and professor, once described the university as his "academic and intellectual home" and "a very fine place to develop as a writer." If he hadn’t had Rice to hang his hat on, would the world have "Lonesome Dove?"

Reflecting on the life and fate of Rice, we pose another "what if." What if Edgar Odell Lovett had not been the university’s first president? It is Lovett, after all, who inspired the school to excellence.

When he was asked in 1907 to take the reigns as the first president of the soon-to-open Rice Institute, he was a rising star at Princeton.

It was a revolutionary time in higher education. Bold new ideas, such as the notion that teaching and research go hand in hand, would soon transform the American university. Lovett knew he was being offered an incredible opportunity: to conceive a major university from scratch at such an exciting moment in history.

Leaving the East Coast to journey to Texas, he would be entering the "frontier in American education," according to Professor of History John Boles, who notes that, at the time, the combined income for all 15 colleges and universities in Texas was 40 percent less than Princeton’s. Houston was still a small city, and the Rice campus was beyond a paved road.

From the start, Lovett brought in world-class faculty and established a first-rate academic environment. Adhering to those standards, Rice has developed into one of America’s best teaching and research universities.

For decades, Rice has been collaborating with NASA to explore the frontiers of space–doing everything from conducting successful experiments on the moon to discovering antimatter near the center of the Milky Way. Rice’s chair of the Department of Space Physics and Astronomy, Patricia Reiff, is a member of the NASA strategic planning team that is laying out its flying missions for the next 20 years.

It is not often said in Texas, but small can be beautiful. Small as in the personal size of the Rice community and small as in nanotechnology.

At Rice, Nobel Prize-winning chemists Richard Smalley and Robert Curl discovered the buckyball, the third molecular form of carbon. That discovery could profoundly change the world. At the Center of Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice, physicists and chemists are developing computers the size of molecules.

If Rice hadn’t come into being, we might be without these scientific breakthroughs, but that’s not all the world would miss. Great things are also happening in the arts and the humanities.

Rice’s School of Humanities houses one of the nation’s top history departments, and its philosophy department is a leader in medical ethics. Among the many outstanding teachers in humanities are Professor of English Dennis Huston, a Carnegie Foundation National Professor of the Year; and Professor of Sociology Bill Martin, whose articles on religion have appeared in Harper’s, Atlantic and Texas Monthly.

Rice’s nationally-renowned School of Architecture is broadening the scope of architecture to include the study of complex social and economic issues, and through its ambitious Rice Building Workshop, students are designing imaginative and affordable houses for Houston’s inner city.

The Shepherd School of Music, one of the best music schools in the country, has on its faculty renowned scholars and musicians including double-Grammy and ASCAP winners. Shepherd School graduates go on to find work in the world’s finest symphonies and opera companies.

The Jesse H. Jones Graduate Jones Graduate School of Management is quickly becoming one of the most innovative business schools in the U.S.

after launching a series of leading-edge initiatives within the last two years, including a joint MBA/MD program with Baylor College of Medicine. It is fitting that Rice is on Main Street: It has had a major impact on Houston. Located in the heart of city’s cultural center and bounded by the museum district and Medical Center, Rice was the first institution to go up in the area.

The presence of a great university changes a city. If Rice had not been in Houston, NASA might not have been built near the city. Rice even donated the land for NASA’s Johnson Spacecraft Center.

Along with economic benefits, such as making Houston more attractive to industry, there are the intangibles Rice brings, such as enhancing the intellectual climate and improving the quality of life.

Through the Rice University School of Continuing Studies, the largest continuing studies program in Texas, members of the Houston community can hear lectures from many of the school’s outstanding professors and partake in its academic excellence. And Houston’s music lovers can hear concerts by the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra, considered to be the finest among American music schools, in the beautiful and acoustically-splendid Stude Concert Hall.

Rice is also committed to community service, locally and beyond. The university has about 40 outreach programs dedicated to the improvement of K—12 public education. Undergraduates in the Rice Student Volunteer Program (RSVP) spend their spring and summer breaks providing assistance to disadvantaged residents in Houston and as far away as Central America.

A research university that takes its undergraduates very seriously, Rice provides an extraordinary academic environment for students of every ethnic and economic background.

Taking into account academic quality and affordability, Kiplinger’s recently declared Rice to be the No. 1 value in America among private colleges.

Rice has come far in little time, and as the 21st century approaches, we can only imagine what the future will bring.

Without the generosity of William Marsh Rice and the vision of Edgar Odell Lovett, how different the world would be.