HHMI政策的重大改变-建立实体交叉科学研究中心

发信人: rocksheng (滚石), 信区: Bioinfo
标 题: HHMI政策的重大改变-建立实体交叉科学研究中心
发信站: 生命玄机 BBS (Thu Sep 2 02:50:24 2004)，WWW信件

Great News for biomedical research....

From EMBO reports:
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/embor/journal/v5/n9/full/7400
247.html

HHMI作为世界上最顶级的生物医学基金会，准备建立自己历史上的第一个实体研究所，

效仿英国的MRC实验室，欧洲的EMBL实验室，美国的冷泉港实验室和贝尔实验室的模式

地点位于离华盛顿特区45分钟路程的地方，占地281英亩。
在2006年夏天开始运作的时候，将招聘200-300 permanent scientific staff .

这是HHMI历史上深远意义的改革，以往的研究员都分布在美国各个大学，HHMI
仅仅是资金资助，这种模式的问题是很难进行真正的交叉科学研究，所以HHMI
准备开始自己拥有仅属于自己的研究员。当然，传统的资助模式还是会保留，
即对每个研究院给于至少一期5年，每年100万美元的资助。

新的研究所将是一个生物学与计算科学，工程技术的交叉科学研究所，关于这
这个雄心勃勃的计划，HHMI的president, Thomas Cech说，
“在分析未来生物医学的发展方向的时候，我们发现所有的进步都跟工程技术的
进步关联，比如imaging, proteomics,structure determination
and computational biology，我们不是要做这些技术的使用者，而是要作下
一代新技术的发明者。”在新的HHMI大楼里面，将看到工程学家和生物学家
working side by side..

新的研究所是各个学科的科学家能够有机会深入交流合作，类似的计划有NIH的
Roadmap framework，Berkeley的5亿美元的健康科学计划，斯坦福大学的Bio-X
交叉科学中心以及MIT的Whitehead Institute。

特别的一点是，这个新的研究所不会资助一些已经受到政府和工业界广泛关注的领域，

诸如基因组科学之类，而会重点关注神经生物学。

但是NIH已经大力资助Alzeimer病之类的神经退行性疾病的研究，这也不是HHMI的方向，

HHMI将focus在neuronal models of the brain,诺贝尔奖Kandell说“这个领域需要大量

量光学，电子学，和化学荧光分子设计的科学家，这在任何一个单独的大学很难实现，

在过去的50年里面，我们对大脑如何工作已经取得惊人的成绩，但是局限在一次研究

一个细胞或者一个分子，而对神经细胞网络的相互作用研究不多。对神经细胞网络的imag
ing，将是第一个我们关心的领域。”

Room of its own

The new Janelia Farm Research Campus for multidisciplinary research is a major
change in strategy for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Vicki Brower




This autumn, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI; Chevy Chase, MD, USA)
will begin an initial recruiting round for scientists to conduct research at i
ts new campus, Janelia Farm, which it is now building in rural Loudoun County,
Virginia, about a 45-minute drive from Washington, DC. The US$500 million pro
ject broke ground in May 2003 and will house 200–300 permanent scientific sta
ff on 281 acres when operational in the summer of 2006. It represents a radica
l change from HHMI's current model of funding researchers at home institutions
, towards creating a multidisciplinary and collaborative research environment
that incorporates various aspects of other independent research institutions a
round the world.

"In our vision of building a new model of research community, we have created
nothing original, but rather have made use of many aspects of various models w
orldwide, including the Medical Research Council [MRC] Laboratory of Molecular
Biology [LMB] in Cambridge, UK, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EM
BL; Heidelberg, Germany], and Bell Labs in Murray Hill [NJ, USA]," said geneti
cist Gerald Rubin, Vice President of HHMI and Director of the Janelia Farm Res
earch Campus (Fig 1). While they all differ radically from each other, these s
uccessful research environments share certain characteristics: they have small
, individual research groups with leaders who are active bench scientists; int
ernal, dependable and generous funding; excellent support facilities and infra
structure; high staff turnover with limited or no tenure, and an emphasis on o
riginality, creativity and collegiality. Other institutions that served as a m
odel for the Janelia Farm plan were Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories (Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington'
s Department of Embryology (Baltimore, MD, USA).


The goal of HHMI funding has been, and remains, to support scientists with inn
ovative ideas who may not receive support from government or industry because
their research is basic or 'blue sky' research

"The plan for Janelia Farm corresponds to a European model of research, but go
es beyond what European institutions fund," commented Daniela Rhodes, a struct
ural biologist who works on chromatin and telomere structure at the LMB. "It's
not a new idea—the LMB is [over] 50 years old—but I think it's a great step
," she said. "There is a great need to integrate disciplines to tackle scienti
fic problems. ... I believe it is much more efficient to have a few hundred sc
ientists under one roof, centrally funded, taking risks, not having to apply f
or grants." In fact, the LMB's success has come largely from funding long-term
work with risky outcomes, observed Nobel laureate John Sulston in his book Th
e Common Thread (Bantam Press, London, 2002). In 1947, the MRC established a l
ab for 'research on the molecular structure of biological systems' to enable M
ax Perutz, the laboratory's first director, and John Kendrew to develop their
research using X-ray diffraction to study proteins. "It took Max Perutz 23 years...to solve the structure of haemoglobin, and many chemists a
nd biologists thought he was wasting his time," Sulston wrote. "You didn't—an
d still don't—have to justify everything in advance; you were just given the
time, and a limited amount of space and resources, to get on with it." A simil
ar spirit is found in other internationally successful research institutions,
such as the EMBL or the German Max Planck Institutes. It is therefore an intri
guing experiment: how will HHMI, with its considerable funds, add to these suc
cesses with its own research institute?

According to Rubin, HHMI does not seek to change its original mandate of suppo
rting individual scientists, but rather to complement its model of funding abo
ut 320 researchers each year at their 70 home institutions. The goal of HHMI f
unding has been, and remains, to support scientists with innovative ideas who
may not receive support from government or industry because their research is
basic or 'blue sky' research. "HHMI funds people, not projects," said Avice Me
ehan, HHMI Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs. Typically, ea
ch HHMI investigator receives about US$1 million per year for an initial term
of five years, after which he or she is evaluated and either funded for an add
itional five years, or granted two more years of 'terminal', or final, funding
. HHMI investigators are technically HHMI employees, but spend up to 20% of th
eir time on other tasks, such as teaching or administrative work. A defining f
eature of HHMI support, however, is that it is geared to freeing up grantees from most non-research-oriented responsibilities, which typify c
areers in academic science. Importantly, it also aims to relieve the scientist
s that it funds from the ever-pressing and onerous need to write grants and pr
ogress reports.

Janelia Farm will take this one step further. It will free researchers even mo
re from serving two masters—HHMI and their home institution—and the need to
balance their HHMI work and other tasks to remain in good standing at their ho
me base, such as publishing and worrying about tenure, said Rubin. But more im
portantly, it will provide a meeting place for scientists from many fields to
work together in mixed teams of chemists, physicists, computer scientists and
engineers with biomedical researchers to solve problems that require interdisc
iplinary effort and expensive infrastructure.

The idea of building a research campus started with a surplus from the technol
ogy boom in the mid-to-late 1990s, which increased HHMI's endowment and the ne
ed to reinvest into the organization. The plan was hatched in 1999 over a seri
es of conversations between Nobel laureate, and now HHMI President, Thomas Cec
h, David Clayton—Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer—and Rubin. "Whi
le we had the funding to add researchers, we felt that growing past about 330
would require putting in a middle-level bureaucracy, which we wanted to avoid
to preserve the unique character of HHMI," said Rubin. "Keeping the current nu
mber of scientists funded means that they all have access to each of us, but g
rowing past that would mean the quality [of interactions] would suffer."


Another major goal is to promote collegial interchange that is simply not poss
ible in university research environments




The real key to Janelia Farm is that it is complementary to HHMI's existing pr
ogrammes. "We would not have built Janelia Farms to house existing research si
mply for pride of ownership," explained Cech. "In analysing the direction in w
hich biomedical research is moving, we saw that progress is linked to tools: i
maging, proteomics, structure determination and computational biology. We want
to be not just users, but creators of the next generation of tools for the sc
ientific community." Ultimately, HHMI found that it could not accomplish this
by funding researchers at their respective institutions because of the interdi
sciplinary nature of the work required to develop those tools and the expensiv
e infrastructure required. "We thought it would be best to have physicists and
engineers in the same building, working side-by-side with biomedical research
ers," Cech said. "The acid test for building Janelia Farm was, 'could we just
as well support this research at our existing institutions?' If the answer was yes, building it was not what we should be doing."

Another major goal is to promote collegial interchange that is simply not poss
ible in university research environments. "Academia is a system in which indiv
iduals must, of necessity, distinguish themselves from their colleagues, and w
hich does not reward scientists for collaborating," said Nobel laureate Eric K
andel, University Professor at Columbia University (New York, NY, USA) and HHM
I senior investigator. Also, academia does not easily foster interdisciplinary
research, he added. While Janelia Farm does not seek to serve as a model to c
hange either academia or industry, it does aim to provide an alternative envir
onment in which science that is not well served by either can be done. "We don
't seek to compete with what's being done in research now, but rather to do wh
at can't now be done in academia or industry," Rubin added. "Janelia Farm seek
s to create a unique research environment where gifted investigators interact
with each other and are rewarded for working together to achieve a higher goal," Kandel said. "The research done at Janelia Farm should ideal
ly be more than the sum of its parts."

HHMI believes that, because of their independence and their strong funding bas
is, they are in an excellent position to create a research environment that fr
ees researchers from the constraints that limit collaboration and creativity,
thus maximizing their creativity, flexibility and collaborative possibilities.
In fact, this push for multidisciplinary research can be seen in many other i
nstitutions: the 'Roadmap' framework of the US National Institutes of Health (
NIH; Bethesda, MA, USA), the University of California, Berkeley's US$500 milli
on Health Sciences Initiative, Stanford University's Bio-X programme and the B
road Institute (Cambridge, MA, USA)—an interdisciplinary genomics institute a
nnounced last year by the Whitehead Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and other partners—are just a few new projects that aim to promote
interdisciplinary biomedical research.


The ultimate success of the Janelia Farm endeavour will depend on the balance
of researchers and which areas of study are selected...




Nevertheless, HHMI will not pursue areas such as genomics because a good deal
of government and private funding is already being devoted to it. "It will hap
pen whether we fund it or not. We want to pick an area that would not be done—
or done well—otherwise," Rubin said. Janelia Farms will do what cannot or is
not being done elsewhere because of financial or structural constraints. One l
ikely area of focus will be neurobiology. "In neurobiology, a good deal of tra
nslational research is being conducted in Alzheimer's disease and stroke at th
e NIH, but much less is being done in basic research of neuronal models of the
brain," Kandel said. "This is an area that requires experts in optics, electr
onics, chemical dyes—we don't have access to those technical capabilities at
this or any other university. For the past 50 years, we've made incredible pro
gress on understanding how the brain works, but we've studied one cell or mole
cule at a time." Thus, cellular interaction imaging—specifically, neural circuitry imaging—is likely to become one of the first projects.

The ultimate success of the Janelia Farm endeavour will depend on the balance
of researchers and which areas of study are selected, said Gerald Fischbach, E
xecutive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences, and Dean of the Sc
hool of Medicine at Columbia University. The plan now envisions two types of r
esident investigators at the campus—24 group leaders and 20 fellows—as well
as visiting scientists. With research groups of 2–6 lab members, there will b
e about 180 researchers, plus another 80 to provide core scientific support. A
ll group leaders will be involved in hands-on research and will participate in
structured and unstructured collegial interchange to encourage collaboration
between groups. HHMI plans to have half of the 24 group leaders already identi
fied when the campus becomes operational, and the rest within 3–4 years after
that. The initial appointment for group leaders will be for six years, with a
nnual performance reviews. Fellows will join Janelia Farm soon after earning their doctorate degree, or will come to change research directio
n, or as mature scientists wishing to return to research without administrativ
e duties. The campus will also enable up to 100 scientists to visit on-site; t
hese may be current HHMI investigators or short-term visitors who are collabor
ating with staff, or using research facilities.

Interdisciplinarity and collaboration are also reflected in the architecture.
The scientific programme and physical facilities have been planned together, w
ith the objectives of collaboration and flexibility remaining foremost. Lead a
rchitect Rafael Viñoly and HMMI architect and senior facilities officer
Robert McGhee have planned a low-rise, terraced, rambling site that blends in
with the rolling hills and preserves views of the nearby countryside (Fig 2).
"We have designed labs that will be open and accessible to both the outdoors
and communal spaces, and offices located in pods around meeting space," said M
cGhee. Workspace will be adaptable and convertible into other functions—to su
pport physics and engineering needs, for example.

an experiment in the anthropology of scientific research, with its emphasis on
collaboration over a wide range of scientific disciplines. It follows other s
uccessful models in the USA and Europe that have become incubators for scienti
fic research that are not primarily funded by government or industry, and whic
h consequently do not suffer from the strict departmental borders found at mos
t universities. Whether it will establish itself on a par with other independe
nt research institutions, such as the LMB, the EMBL or Bell Labs, will be seen
over time, as every institution needs time to hit its stride.




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