NEWS

For Basic Researchers, Janelia Farm Will Offer Unparalleled Resources

Charles Marwick

A unique facility with the aim of moving biomedical research forward in the 21st century is under construction some 30 miles from Washington, D.C. But it will not be just another research laboratory. Rather, the plan is to take advantage of the developing technologies and tools that are opening new doors and, in turn, develop as yet unknown ways to advance the next generation of biomedical research. It is an ambitious project and one that does not exist anywhere in the United States today.

Funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Bethesda, Md., the $500 million facility—the Janelia Farm Research Campus, a 281-acre site on the Potomac River in Ashburn, Va.—will be home to a research staff of 200 to 300 people, with laboratories available for about 100 visiting researchers.



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Howard Hughes Medical Institute has invested $500 million to build the Janelia Farm Research Campus on 281 acres 30 miles from Washington, D.C. When completed in 2006, it will have laboratory facilities for 200 to 300 permanent scientists and 100 or so visiting scientists, and the campus will have a conference center, a 96-room hotel, and 36 two-bedroom apartments for visiting scientists. (© Rafael Viñoly Architects)

 
Traditional research settings have difficulty handling interdisciplinary research, said Thomas Cech, Ph.D., president of HHMI. The institute’s answer to that problem is to get the instrumentation under one roof and bring the scientists to the instruments rather than get the instruments to the scientists. "We don’t want to be just a central resource facility for state-of-the-art instrumentation. We want to be involved in creating the next generation of the instruments that will move the field forward," Cech said.



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Dr. Thomas Cech

 
But supplying the instrumentation and technology is only the first step. "We are going to try and provide a home for the type of science that is highly disciplinary and focused on developing new tools to advance science," said Gerald Rubin, Ph.D., vice president and director of the Janelia Farm Research Campus.



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Dr. Gerald Rubin (© Paul Fetters for HHMI)

 
The plan is not to compete with Hughes’ existing programs but rather to complement and extend them. (HHMI supports more than 300 investigators at 70 institutions throughout the United States.) "What we plan to do here is not to create another similar institution. We wanted to do something different," Rubin said.

Changing Landscape

And something different is what is needed to keep pace with the evolution of research. "Biological research has changed," Cech said. "The landscape of opportunity in the biomedical sciences is not what it used to be." He cited a number of factors that contribute to this changing landscape. One is the completion of the Human Genome Project. Another is the availability of large databases and the increasing importance of computers in the biological sciences.

"It was not so long ago that computers were mostly used by scientists to prepare their papers for publication and to process their data," Cech said. "Now, many researchers spend half of each day doing experiments on computers rather than the bench top. And this changes the way we operate. We wanted to be involved in creating the tools for computational biology that will help move the field forward."

Imaging instrumentation has also changed. "It allows one to look inside individual cells, either fixed cells, or cells that are responding to their environment; for instance, cells that have been damaged by mutations and so altering gene function. ... These advances have completely changed the way that biomedical scientists go about their work and are going to have a transforming effect on medicine in the next decade or two," Cech predicted.

Furthermore, building and maintaining these instruments requires engineers, physicists, and computer scientists as well as the participation of the biologists who are dealing with the problems that need to be solved. "You need the people who know how to build the instruments and how to do the computational work to be working in close proximity to those who know about the biological systems where these techniques are going to be applied," Cech said.

A Unique Facility

With the goal of creating a unique research facility to address all of these problems, leaders at HHMI looked to other successful research institutes for inspiration, such as Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y., the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.

"All of them had attractive features," Rubin said. "But the two that we felt were the most successful were the Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., and the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. There are differences. The MRC is publicly funded and even at its peak never had more than 300 people. Bell Labs is corporately funded and has about 3,000 employees. But when you look at what made them successful, there are some general rules that emerge that are very different from the top research environments at universities in the United States. We think we can apply these at Janelia Farm."

Rubin outlined the factors that made these laboratories successful. The first is the small size of the individual research groups. At Bell Labs the principal investigator has at most only two people in the group. At the MRC the group size was a bit bigger but never more than 4 or 5 people under a single investigator. By comparison, the average HHMI investigator has between 10 and 15 people in a group. In many universities, that is the standard.

Second, the scientific work is all internally funded. Rather than the investigators having to write grants, send them off to the appropriate funding agencies, and get them reviewed, the money to do the work is provided internally by the parent organization.

"This is very important," Rubin commented, "since many feel, and with some justification, that grant review bodies tend to be more conservative. They are very good at funding science that would make an incremental forward advance and have an 80% chance of working. But they don’t have a very good track record at funding things that may only have a 10% or 20% chance of working but be very important—if they work. When research is internally funded, investigators can take on riskier, more venturesome projects. At Janelia Farm we plan to fund people, not projects. This leaves them free to work on their ideas."

The third element is the high turnover of researchers and no tenured positions. At both Bell Labs and the MRC, there is a high turnover of researchers. People spent only a portion of their career there and then moved on, often to very senior positions, said Rubin. At Janelia Farm, there will be no lifetime tenure in the academic sense, although appointments can be renewed.

"We hope to create an environment for people with a variety of backgrounds—computational biologists, mathematicians, engineers, as well as biologists—to work together and who have no teaching or administrative responsibilities," Rubin said.

By the year 2010, Rubin said, there will be 400 people working at Janelia Farm. The facility will be open to researchers from around the world. About 180 would be group leaders and their research groups, and 120 would be support people—non-scientist administration and scientific support staff. Some 100 visitors can come for a week or two or up to a year to use the resources at Janelia Farm. When construction is completed in 2006, there will be a conference center and a 96-room hotel for visitors as well as 36 two-bedroom apartments for longer-term visitors.

"So, putting these factors together—small groups, principal investigators working in the laboratory, internal funding, people with different backgrounds working together—we think will create a unique environment that does not exist anywhere in the United States today," Rubin said.

Rubin likens the plans for Janelia Farm as similar to building a biotechnology company. But, as he points out, biotechnology companies are beholden to their investors and ultimately have to produce something of commercial worth. "Eventually, of course, we have to produce something of worth too. But our product is new basic knowledge."



             
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