Farming for new opportunities

It is a rare twenty-first century biologist who hasn’t found themselves at some point dreaming of a simpler, less administrative, more collegial time in research. For some, that dream may entail a trip back to the 1950s, when early molecular biology hooligans shook each other down for ideas in the pubs of Cambridge. But for Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the dream lies in the near future and is embodied in their ambitious Janelia Farm research laboratories, set to open doors in the summer of 2006. With the first round of appointments now made, the scientific nexus of the laboratories has begun to take shape, enlivened by a good deal of enthusiasm and energy expressed by the newly appointed lab heads. Intended as haven for top researchers drawn from different fields, Janelia Farm is perhaps distinguished from other largescale interdisciplinary endeavors by the decision to establish at the outset some specific problems on which to focus research efforts. 2004 marked an intense series of five workshops whose goal was finding a suitable focus for the new labs. Two related problems — understanding neural circuitry, and developing cellular imaging technology — beat out stiff competition in other fields, including topics in membrane biology, perception and behavior, and cellular biochemistry. The development of the freestanding research campus marks a distinct departure for HHMI, which has historically fulfilled its research mission primarily through the appointments of individual investigators who carry out Hughes-funded research at their home institutions. The Janelia campus, once built and fully staffed, is envisioned to include 20 to 30 group leaders and a permanent research staff of about 300 scientists. Joint graduate programs with the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago will allow PhD students to participate. Gerry Rubin, HHMI Vice President and Director of Janelia Farm, says that when the project was first envisioned, Hughes was looking to make a qualitative change in the Institute’s impact. At the time, money was available to fund 50 more Hughes investigators — which at a recent peak already numbered nearly 450 – and the NIH budget was doubling. Rubin characterizes those early discussions, which included HHMI Chief Scientific Officer David Clayton, and President, Tom Cech, as a thought experiment on what could be done with Hughes resources that would have more impact — and would be more useful — for biomedical research than just having 50 more investigators. According to Rubin, “that was the beginning. Janelia Farm was the answer to that question.” Janelia Farm represented for Rubin and colleagues the opportunity to create the kind of research environment that had facilitated great advancements in the past — an environment that they recognized was today vanishing, especially in the U.S. Their inspirations were collaborative, interdisciplinary research hothouses of the past and present — places like Bell Labs, Cold Spring Harbor Labs, EMBL, and perhaps most prominently, the storied MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology — places that produced some of the foremost work in science in the last century, in large part, the thinking goes, thanks to the richly supported but non-constraining environments they provided researchers. This summer, the who and what of Janelia Farm has begun to take further shape with the naming of the first round of group leaders. Features