quarta-feira, 30 de novembro de 2011

Por que não podemos fazer como os cientistas americanos




Cientistas americanos irão expor seus trabalhos aos capitalistas, ou seja buscam investimento para suas pesquisas, mostrando que elas tem potencial de gerar negócios e lucros

Por aqui, ainda somos ingênuos e achamos que só com verbas públicas podemos fazer pesquisas e há uma desconfiança de ambos os lados - os pesquisadores que estão nas Instituições públicas desconfiam ou não confiam nos capitalistas locais que são os donos das industrias e o sistema financeiro, por outro lado, esses também não acreditam em nossa ciência. Se os capitalistas locais, donos das industrias tomassem a decisão de empregar nossos pós docs e desenvolvessem pesquisa aplicada e desenvolvimento como outros paises desenvolvidos seria a garantia de um desenvolvimento sustentável. No momento, os maior sempregador es dos nossos pós graduandos são ainda as Instituições de ensino e pesquisa, mas essa fonte de emprego tem um limite.


Está na hora do Brasil assumir que é capitalista e deixar o falso discurso de esquerda


Scientists, meet capitalists
US agencies and scientific societies aim to create jobs by teaching researchers how to be entrepreneurs.

Eugenie Samuel Reich
30 November 2011

It will be a presentation unlike any Satish Kandlikar has given before. At a meeting on 14 December, the mechanical engineer, who works at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York state, will speak to venture capitalists at Stanford University in California about a technology to cool and extend the life of light-emitting diodes. He's not raising money, but — along with 20 other researchers — he'll be playing the role of entrepreneur in front of a roomful of instructors from the business world.

The moment is also a first for the Innovation Corps (I-Corps), launched in July by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). The programme has given Kandlikar and 20 other principal investigators US$50,000 each to develop a business plan centred on their NSF-funded research. At the Stanford meeting, grant recipients will seek feedback on their ideas. Turning research into products is not a task his team has much experience with, says Kandlikar: “As researchers, we have no idea how to commercialize a product. The programme is the driving force.”

US science agencies have long encouraged their grantees to build bridges with industry. Through the Small Business Innovation Research programme, founded in 1982, the NSF, the US Department of Energy and other agencies allocate 2.5% of their grant money each year to business ventures. Many US universities also help faculty members to patent and commercialize their research.

Now, with unemployment high and cuts to federal budgets looming, science agencies want to cast themselves as part of the economic solution, rather than expensive add-ons. Across government, agencies are finding ways to link their activities to job creation. The NSF's move to encourage academics to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, and perhaps found firms, takes the drive to commercialize to a new level. The I-Corps is already gearing up to receive its next round of applications in January.

The approach is spreading. Concerned that US research jobs in chemistry are in decline, the American Chemical Society (ACS), based in Washington DC, has begun an entrepreneurship training programme, with a first round of applications due on 15 January. The idea is to try to get chemists to create their own opportunities.

“When my students say 'I want to get out and do something to help the world', I say basically you have to start your own company now,” says George Whitesides, a prominent Harvard University chemist who chaired a recent ACS panel to study innovation, chemistry and jobs. Whitesides was speaking on 2 November at a meeting of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in Washington DC.

But many academics are reluctant to take a chance with a start-up, says Henry Sauermann, an economist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who has studied scientists' career choices. “Their main concern is lack of job security and stability,” he says.

Sociologist Waverly Ding at the University of Maryland, College Park, who has studied academic entrepreneurship, adds that programmes such as the I-Corps may work well for established investigators. But younger scientists have a harder time raising capital, and taking time away from research is less likely to benefit them, she says.

Sauermann believes that entrepreneurship programmes should focus on educating academics about what such choices involve. Errol Arkilic, one of three NSF programme officers organizing the I-Corps, says this is the intention. That's why the venture capitalists on hand to assess business plans at the Stanford meeting later this month will be acting as instructors, not as potential investors.

“The programme was established to help researchers understand the commercial viability of their research,” not to help them found companies and create jobs, says Arkilic — although he adds that the NSF would not be unhappy to see that as an outcome.

Kandlikar wants his work to yield economic benefits, but the effort is already taking its toll, with his group spending about 100 hours a week on its business plan. Like science, the market demands devotion.

terça-feira, 29 de novembro de 2011

19 milionarios por dia- Reportagem da Forbes

Brazil's Booming Economy Is Creating 19 'Millionaires' Every Day

BRASIL EM FESTA, COPA DO MUNDO !! LET'S PARTY ...
Brazil has been adding 19 ‘millionaires’ per day since 2007 — and that statistic will likely be repeated over the next three years as Latin America’s economic super-power continues to deliver stellar GDP growth and consumption rates, according to bankers. Note that these are millionaires in Brazilian currency terms. Someone worth 1 million Reais has a net worth of roughly $540,000.
Speaking on the fringes of the Private Banking Latin America 2011 conference last week, Guilhermo Morales, head of Latin American private banking for Portuguese lender Millennium BCP, said Brazilian consumption continues to grow very strongly, boosting the fortunes of retailers, banks and a plethora of industries that are clamoring for size. As these businesses grow, so does their owners’ wealth.

“There are many emerging companies growing very fast, especially in retail, but also in healthcare, real-estate, construction and other basic industries,” Morales pointed out. He said M&A activity is also gaining traction as many industries look to consolidate or large players (both locally and abroad)  snap up smaller ones. A case in point is Schneider Electric’s recent purchase of small Brazilian electrical supplier Steck Group for some $350 million.
Added Morales: “There are many undercover deals like this going on right now, involving several  industries and big payouts for the acquired company owners.”
Another factor accounting for the rising tide of millionaires are high executive and banker salaries, which Morales said often beat those paid in the US. He noted it’s common for Brazilian investment bankers to make a $539,000 ($1m reais) annual bonus these days while CEOs can make an average of $75,000 a year.
According to other bankers, Brazil’s booming real-estate industry has also generated huge wealth as property values have doubled in recent years and are poised to increase further, especially in Rio de Janerio, as the city girds up to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
Individuals with a net worth ranging from $539,000 – $2.7 million ($1m-$5m reais) make up the bulk of the new millionaires, Morales said, adding that most private banks tend to individuals whose net worth falls below $5.4 million ($10m reais).
“I think that this trend will continue for the next three years but I don’t see it lasting forever. After all, there is a limit to everything,” Morales noted.
Brazil’s economy has been growing at an annual average of 5% in recent years and is predicted to maintain that pace in the medium term. However, some economists have warned that the country’s economy could overheat as inflation rises to unsustainable levels.
The 19-millionaires-a-day statistic was measured by taking all of an individual’s wealth into account, including investments, property, savings and other assets in addition to cash. Some in the private banking conference said the statistic seemed a bit overhyped but Emerson Pieri, Head of Wealth Management, Latin America, at Haliwell Bank (which unveiled the millionaire statistics as part of a Brazilian wealth management study) insisted they are reliable.
He added Brazil currently has 137,000 millionaires and (according to Forbes’ 2011 World Billionaires’ list)  some 30 billionaires, with 70% of the country’s wealth concentrated in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janerio. Pieri said Brazil represents an enormous opportunity for private banks to meet the needs of its growing millionaire community as well an emerging class of ultra-high networth individuals.

Deficiência em Vitamina D e tuberculose


Shedding light on the vitamin D–tuberculosis–HIV connection
Authors

The paper in PNAS by Martineau et al. (1) raises a key public health issue: how much vitamin D do you need to fight tuberculosis (TB)? Martineau et al. (1) found that there is a significant association of vitamin D deficiency with susceptibility to TB and that the impact is greater in HIV-infected than noninfected individuals. In addition, Martineau et al. (1) discover a striking temporal relationship between vitamin D deficiency and TB. The reporting of new TB cases in Cape Town, South Africa, was lowest in the months after the seasonal increase in serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25D) levels, whereas the reporting of new TB cases was highest in the months following the season with the lowest serum 25D levels.

The major source of vitamin D for humans derives from sun exposure; in the skin, UVB induces conversion of 7-dehydrocholesterol to previtamin D3 and then vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). In the liver, vitamin D3 is 25-hydroxylated to form 25D. 25D is then converted in the kidney by the 1-α-hydroxylase, CYP27b1, to 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25D), the bioactive, hormonal form of vitamin D that is bound with high affinity and specificity by the vitamin D receptor (VDR). Serum 1,25D levels are maintained in a constant range by parathyroid hormone regulation of the CYP27b1 gene. Therefore, circulating levels of 25D are the best clinical assessment of adequate vitamin D status. Some of the factors that determine 25D levels include latitude (25D levels can be maintained year round in the equatorial regions between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn), skin color (10 times as much UVB is required to produce the same amount of vitamin D in dark- vs. light-skinned individuals), outdoor activity, body surface exposed, oral supplementation, and SNPs in several vitamin D metabolism genes.

Martineau et al. (1) also report that …

↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rmodlin@mednet.ucla.edu.

Related Article
Biological Sciences - Medical Sciences:
Adrian R. Martineau, Shepherd Nhamoyebonde, Tolu Oni, Molebogeng X. Rangaka, Suzaan Marais, Nonzwakazi Bangani, Relebohile Tsekela, Lizl Bashe, Virginia de Azevedo, Judy Caldwell, Timothy R. Venton, Peter M. Timms, Katalin A. Wilkinson, and Robert J. Wilkinson
From the Cover: Reciprocal seasonal variation in vitamin D status and tuberculosis notifications in Cape Town, South Africa PNAS 2011 108 (47) 19013-19017; published ahead of print October 24, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1111825108
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Published online before print November 14, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1116513108 PNAS November 22, 2011 vol. 108 no. 47 18861-18862

segunda-feira, 28 de novembro de 2011

The Anoited - NEW Yorker- Significa ??

read the full text...que foi ungida -  que foi abençoada pelo santo óleo

THE ANOINTED

Can a former political radical lead Brazil through its economic boom?

by DECEMBER 5, 2011

Subscribers can read this article on our iPad app or in our online archive. (Others can pay for access.)

ABSTRACT: A REPORTER AT LARGE about Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Until recently, Brazil has been one of the most uneducated, economically imbalanced countries in the world. Now its economy is growing much more rapidly than that of the U.S. Twenty-eight million Brazilians have moved out of severe poverty in the past decade. The country has a balanced budget, low national debt, nearly full employment, and low inflation. It is, chaotically, democratic, and it has a free press. Brazil operates in ways we have been conditioned to think are incompatible with a successful free society. It isn’t just that Brazil is ruled by unapologetic former revolutionaries, many of whom—including the President—were imprisoned for years for being terrorists. The central government is far more powerful and intrusive than it is in the U.S. It is also far more corrupt. Crime is high, schools are weak, roads are bad, and ports barely function. And yet, among the world’s major economic powers, Brazil has achieved a rare trifecta: high growth, political freedom, and falling inequality. The President, Dilma Rousseff, is a forceful presence. As part of the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard, she spent years in prison and was subjected to torture. Her first major Presidential initiative, Brasil Sem Miséria, unveiled in June, was a sweeping anti-poverty program. The U.S. constantly seems to be on Rousseff’s mind, as an example of how not to handle the global economic crisis. Politics in Brazil revolves around Rousseff’s predecessor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, known to Brazilians and the rest of the world simply as Lula. For the last five of Lula’s eight years as President, Rousseff served as his Minister of the Civil House. Lula anointed her as his successor in 2010. Describes the political history of Brazil. Mentions President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The writer describes his visit with Lula in São Paulo. Brazil will be hosting the World Cup, in 2014, and the Olympics, in 2016. Rousseff, now sixty-three, was a university student during the 1964 coup that established Brazil’s military dictatorship, and she quickly became radicalized. By the late sixties, she was married to another militant, Cláudio Galeno Linhares. They lived in hiding, storing and transporting caches of guns, bombs, and stolen money, planning and executing “actions.” Later, she left Galeno for Carlos Araújo, another prominent militant. In early 1970, the military caught up with her, and she spent three years in prison, where she was reportedly subjected to extensive torture. She insists she was never personally involved in violent actions during her militant days. After she was released, she went to graduate school in economics and then worked in a think tank. She joined the mainline political party, the Partido Democrático Trabalhista (P.D.T.), and soon began working in government positions in Porto Alegre. Eventually, she met with Lula and so impressed him that he appointed her Secretary of Energy in his administration. Mentions the numerous scandals which have plagued Rousseff’s administration. Nobody believes that Rousseff is corrupt, but she had worked for years with some of the people who resigned. Describes the writer’s visit with Rousseff.
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read the full text...


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/05/111205fa_fact_lemann#ixzz1f2yE5YhS

Sexo masculino e feminino são diferentes para a medicina ?

Neste artigo do Lancet chama a atenção para algumas diferenças em doenças cardiovasculares e cancer de pulmão. As mulheres tem mais risco que homens quando fumantes etc

Taking sex into account in medicine




The Lancet
Throughout Europe, despite women often forming the majority of students at university, fewer women than men are appointed to high-level jobs in medicine and science. Evidence presented at the first European Gender Summit in Brussels (Nov 8—9) illustrates that without targets or quotas, it will take decades, maybe centuries, to reach equality at the top. Female role models, mentors, and family friendly employment policies encourage and allow women to aim high. Moreover, gender-diverse teams have higher team IQs and promote innovation. But the case for equality is not only about who makes it to the top, it is also about medicine itself. What women can do for medicine is one thing; what medicine can do for women is also important.
In medicine too, the common assumption is that men and women experience disease and react to treatment in the same way. Increasingly, though, there is evidence to the contrary. A systematic review published in August online in this journal showed that women who smoke have a higher risk of coronary heart disease than do male smokers. Female smokers also have a higher risk of lung cancer than do male smokers. Overall, in most types of cancer, women have higher 5-year survival than do men. In stroke, atrial fibrillation is one example of a more important risk factor in women than in men. Overall, in many diseases, women have more side-effects from treatment than do men. When the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic characteristics of drug metabolism in men and women are analysed, in some cases the unexpected finding would be if sex had no effect. Body surface area, body mass, and the amount of adipose tissue can all affect response to treatment. Therapeutic drug monitoring is the ideal, but impractical in many settings.
Being male or female might be a more important determinant of health, illness, and response to treatment than is known. To find out, and to aid meta-analysts, The Lancet encourages researchers to enrol more women into clinical trials of all phases, and to plan to analyse data by sex, not only when known to be scientifically appropriate, but also as a matter of routine.

quarta-feira, 23 de novembro de 2011

segunda-feira, 21 de novembro de 2011

Paulo Blikstein fala sobre educação em ciência

Pouco conhecido por aqui, mas é professor da Stanford University e desenvolve um porgrama de formação de educadores, em especial do Brasil para mudar a educação brasileira. Tem um fóco em educação das ciências. O que mais chamou a atenção na conversa na Globo News foram os conceitos sobre como educar.


domingo, 20 de novembro de 2011

Gama Delta e IL17 nas inflamações da pele - Immunity


Pivotal Role of Dermal IL-17-Producing γδ T Cells in Skin Inflammation

Immunity, Volume 35, Issue 4, 596-610, 06 October 2011
Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
10.1016/j.immuni.2011.08.001

Authors

Summary

Interleukin-23 (IL-23) and CD4+ T helper 17 (Th17) cells are thought to be critical in psoriasis pathogenesis. Here, we report that IL-23 predominantly stimulated dermal γδ T cells to produce IL-17 that led to disease progression. Dermal γδ T cells constitutively expressed the IL-23 receptor (IL-23R) and transcriptional factor RORγt. IL-17 production from dermal γδ T cells was independent of αβ T cells. The epidermal hyperplasia and inflammation induced by IL-23 were significantly decreased in T cell receptor δ-deficient (Tcrd−/−) and IL-17 receptor-deficient (Il17ra−/−) mice but occurred normally in Tcra−/− mice. Imiquimod-induced skin pathology was also significantly decreased in Tcrd−/− mice. Perhaps further promoting disease progression, IL-23 stimulated dermal γδ T cell expansion. In psoriasis patients, γδ T cells were greatly increased in affected skin and produced large amounts of IL-17. Thus, IL-23-responsive dermal γδ T cells are the major IL-17 producers in the skin and may represent a novel target for the treatment of psoriasis.
 PDF 2.71 MB

A primeira vacina para Malaria recomendada pela WHO


EDITORIAL

A Vaccine for Malaria

Nicholas J. White, F.R.S.
N Engl J Med 2011; 365:1926-1927November 17, 2011
Article
References
It's been a long time coming, and indeed we are still not there yet, but it is becoming increasingly clear that we really do have the first effective vaccine against a parasitic disease in humans. If there are no unforeseen disasters, the RTS,S/AS01 Plasmodium falciparum malaria vaccine should become available in just over 3 years. The World Health Organization (WHO) has already taken the unusual step of indicating that it could recommend this first malaria vaccine for use in some African countries as early as 2015, depending on the full phase 3 trial results that will become available in 2014.1 The vaccine has been developed by a public–private partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) Malaria Vaccine Initiative, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, primarily for use in infants and young children in sub-Saharan Africa. RTS,S/AS01 is a hybrid construct of the hepatitis B surface antigen fused with a recombinant antigen derived from part of the circumsporozoite protein. This is the protein coat of the sporozoite, the parasite stage that is inoculated by the feeding anopheline mosquito, which then invades liver cells and multiplies there before entering the bloodstream. Keys to the success of the vaccine are the immunogenic polymeric nature of RTS,S particles and the proprietary adjuvant AS01. A large number of other potential malaria vaccines are in various stages of development, but the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine is considerably further along the path to registration and potential deployment than the others.
In this issue of the Journal, the RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership provides an interim report of a large, multicenter phase 3 trial of this vaccine.2 A total of 15,460 children in two age categories — 6 to 12 weeks and 5 to 17 months — were enrolled. The report describes vaccine efficacy against P. falciparum malaria in the first 6000 of 8923 children in the older age category, together with an evaluation of the first 250 cases of severe malaria from the two age groups. It is not usual practice to publish the results of trials in pieces, and there does not seem to be a clear scientific reason why this trial has been reported with less than half the efficacy results available. The target population for this vaccine is young infants who would receive the malaria vaccine together with routine immunizations, but the critical efficacy results in this subgroup will not be reported for another year. Even then, only results on short-term efficacy will be available, findings that will be insufficient to assess the public health role of this vaccine.
The interim results are broadly in line with those reported previously in extended phase 2 studies.3-5Protective efficacy against P. falciparum malaria (55% protection against all malaria episodes) was at the upper end of expectations from earlier studies, whereas the overall reduction in severe malaria (35% protection) was slightly less than anticipated.
Trials often throw up unexpected findings. In this trial, there were significantly more cases of meningitis among children receiving the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine than among those receiving the comparator vaccines. There seems to be no plausible explanation for this, and it may well turn out to be a chance finding, but it cannot be ignored. On the other hand, the increased risk of febrile reactions or seizures among RTS,S/AS01 recipients may be real, reflecting the reactogenicity of this highly immunogenic vaccine. Such questions highlight the importance of phase 4 studies of both safety and effectiveness with active surveillance if this vaccine is deployed.
What does this vaccine mean for the future of the control and elimination of malaria? The considerable increase in global funding is paying dividends. In places where effective interventions (insecticide-treated bed nets, insecticides, and artemisinin-combination treatments) are being intensively deployed, malaria morbidity and mortality are falling. Several new, simple, affordable interventions, such as seasonal chemoprevention among young children in areas of seasonally high malaria transmission and the use of artesunate in patients with severe malaria, can also provide substantial reductions in mortality. The very low rate of death from malaria in this large trial (only 10 deaths directly attributed to malaria) testifies to the benefits of providing early diagnosis and effective antimalarial treatment. But there are real dangers ahead. How will the necessary funding be sustained in the face of a global economic downturn, along with a reduction in political pressure associated with declining mortality from malaria? In addition, artemisinin resistance in malaria parasites and pyrethroid resistance in anopheline mosquito vectors pose very serious threats.
All the investigators who have labored long and hard in the development and evaluation of this malaria vaccine deserve congratulations. It is a great achievement and an important advance, but they know that this partially protective vaccine is not the sole solution to the control and elimination of malaria. After registration, the definitive WHO guidance, expected in 2015, may recommend that the inclusion of RTS,S/AS01 in the multipronged attack against malaria is justified. The key question of how long the protection against malaria lasts, particularly in the anticipated context of declining malaria transmission, remains open. An assessment of an 18-month booster dose will not be available until 2014. Another key issue is whether efficacy varies according to the intensity of transmission. We also do not know yet how much the vaccine will cost. All these factors are essential components of the objective assessments of cost-effectiveness that should form the basis of future global and national policy decisions.

sexta-feira, 18 de novembro de 2011

Nariz eletrônico para diagnostico da Tb, penumonia e Câncer de pulmão




Afinal doenças do pulmão podem ser detectadas através do cheiro? O ar expirado dos pulmões doentes são tão diferentes quimicamente permitindo a distinção entre tuberculose e câncer?
Por um acaso um dia falando com Jailson da química UFBa ele já estava buscando algo parecido.

Agora um projeto patrocinado pela Fundação Melinda Gates está financiando essa pesquisa

Veja Lancet November 19, 2011 
Grand Challenges Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are to fund the development of a handheld device called the Electronic Nose for rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis. The device, which works by detecting signature biomarker patterns in a patient's breath, might also be adapted to detect other pulmonary disorders.







quarta-feira, 16 de novembro de 2011

Laboratório de U$500 milhões (R$ 900.000.000)

O laboratório de U$ 500 milhões.

Esta publicação é para ser divulgada e chegar ao Diretor do CPqGM para incnetiva-lo a construir um desses.  Que tal???

Research at Janelia: Life on the farm

Five years in, has a lofty experiment in interdisciplinary research paid off?

Main

The main building of the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, houses laboratory space within expansive windows and interior glass walls.
M. STALEY/JANELIA FARM

Article tool

Gerald Rubin points to three jumbo coffee urns that stand near a dining area in the Janelia Farm main laboratory building, an elegant ribbon of glass and concrete overlooking the Potomac River valley near Ashburn, Virginia. “We figured it was worth spending $20,000 a year to provide high-quality coffee for free,” Rubin explains, “because that way, people won't be tempted to make it in their labs.”
It is true that the coffee is good. But then, everything about this US$300-million facility testifies to the deep pockets of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the not-for-profit research-funding organization in nearby Chevy Chase, Maryland, that opened the Janelia Farm Research Campus five years ago as its first-ever intramural research facility.

The hypothesis is that this $100-million-a-year experiment will produce uncommonly great science. To Rubin, this means being much more than simply excellent. “I'd consider us a failure if, in 20 years, we come back and say, 'We recreated the Salk Institute',” he says, hastening to add that he considers the Salk, located in La Jolla, California, to be one of the best free-standing research facilities in the world. “The point is that we didn't need to build Janelia Farm to do that,” he says.
More significantly, the campus embodies what Rubin calls “an experiment in scientific culture”1. Put world-class researchers in an environment that makes it easy to interact across disciplines — right down to chance encounters around the coffee urns (see 'Cultivating collaboration'). Then put them to work on a handful of grand scientific challenges — long-term, high-risk, high-payoff research that addresses some of the biggest questions in neuroscience. And use the HHMI's ample chequebook to free them from the distractions of conventional academic life. No administrative work, no teaching duties, no chasing tenure, no writing of grants. “This really is the ivory tower,” says Rubin, who was named director of the campus in 2003 and has been involved with the facility since its inception.
A geneticist through and through, he has proposed that Janelia must eventually be able to pass the “deletion test”: just as knocking out a gene can reveal its function, removing Janelia from the future scientific landscape should reveal the vital importance of its contributions to biology.

Early days

Five years into Janelia Farm's life, however, Rubin admits that he has no hard evidence that it will ever pass that exceedingly ambitious test. Given the campus's long-term research focus — and the difficulties of creating a brand-new institute from scratch on former farmland — Rubin says that he does not expect the facility to start producing its best discoveries for another five or even ten years. So far, the experiment has proved only that the promise of well-financed, unfettered academic freedom can indeed entice high-quality researchers to move to a new facility.
Still, the researchers' presence is reflected in the steady increase in publications from Janelia Farm labs (see'Publications on the rise'), and in the growing respect Janelia is commanding from investigators who were initially sceptical of its lofty ambitions.
Getting even this far has been a major accomplishment, says Eric Kandel, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York who was one such sceptic. “No one has hit a home run yet,” he says. “But the team is in place.”
The idea behind Janelia Farm originated in 1999, when Thomas Cech, a biochemist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, had just agreed to become president of the HHMI and was looking to try something new. The HHMI was already funding hundreds of investigators at universities around the world. And with its endowment booming, Cech thought there must be some way for the organization to have a bigger impact on science than just funding a few hundred more. To help him work out how to do this, he recruited Rubin, then a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, as HHMI vice-president for biomedical research.
Rubin began by looking back at some of the wonderful experiences in his own career: summers as an undergraduate at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York; a PhD at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at the University of Cambridge, UK; and three years at the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Embryology in Baltimore, Maryland. He wondered: what had made these places feel so great?
Rubin posed the question to many people, including veterans of non-biological institutes — notably Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which had been an innovation powerhouse before the 1984 break-up of its parent company, AT&T. The answers from all these places were surprisingly consistent, he says. Research groups were small, which promoted communication and mentoring. Group leaders were active bench scientists, not administrators or fund-raisers. Research was funded from within, so there was no need to chase grants. And no one got tenure, so that researchers could rotate through and ideas could stay fresh.
SOURCE: G. RUBIN
Many institutes had implemented some of these principles. Bell Labs and the LMB, despite widely divergent remits in applied physics and molecular biology, had implemented all of them in their glory days. But no one was doing so at the time, says Rubin — especially not the internal-funding part. And that, he argued, was the HHMI's great opportunity.
Cech and the HHMI trustees were sold on the idea from the beginning. But others were not. “I didn't see what was so special about recreating the LMB,” says Kandel, recalling his early scepticism. “It wasn't clear to me what problems would be solved there, or even what fields they would be working in,” he says. Many university investigators funded by the HHMI worried that this new initiative would end up cutting into their money. And most of them doubted that the HHMI would be able to persuade top-quality people to forgo tenure in established research centres and move to a farm outside Ashburn, a dormitory suburb an hour's drive from Washington DC.
Also controversial was the initiative's proposed research strategy of focusing on a handful of grand challenges instead of tackling a wide range of biomedical problems. In 2004, the HHMI held a series of five workshops to determine what those grand challenges would be. One topic they settled on fairly quickly was technologies for biological imaging. “It was a great problem for us,” says Rubin. Not only would it bring together physics, chemistry, biology and many other disciplines, he says, “it was going to be an enabling technology for so many areas, the way [DNA] sequencing had been”.
A second major topic was understanding neural circuits and how they give rise to behaviour. This promised to fill a tremendous gap in neuroscience, says Kandel. “It was clear that we now understood neurons very well,” he explains. “And we had imaging techniques to see how large areas of the brain are interconnected. But there was nothing to link the two.” A new generation of techniques was poised to aid in this quest — most notably optogenetics, in which the activity of specific neurons can be tracked and manipulated using light, allowing researchers to work out the function of those neurons and how they connect.
But at the time, the application of optogenetics to neuroscience was still in its infancy. And there was always the chance that Janelia Farm researchers would spend 20 years deciphering the neural circuitry of, say, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster, only to discover that it had nothing to do with the human brain. Most people thought that the underlying principles and logic of the circuits would have been conserved throughout evolution, says Kandel, but still, “it was a very ballsy move”.

Fertile soil

In October 2006, the HHMI officially opened Janelia Farm's main laboratory facility, dubbed the Landscape building for the way it winds for some 300 metres along the vast, open 'S'-shaped curve of a hillside. It's not exactly a warm and cosy place. The hallways on the upper two floors, where the inner glass walls open onto row upon row of laboratory benches, are so big and full of light that they feel a bit like airport concourses. They also seem to be constantly vanishing around the next bend, which can produce the disconcerting sense that one is stepping off into infinity.
But none of that bothered Julie Simpson when she arrived in the summer of 2006, fresh from a postdoctoral appointment in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She had been eager to get to Janelia Farm ever since hearing Cech give a talk about its philosophy — so eager, she says, that when she moved in, “I had to wear a hard hat because they didn't even have finished floors in my lab yet!”
And she hasn't been disappointed. “I really like being part of a community focused on a particular problem,” she says. “Every talk is relevant, and every colleague is interested in the same basic thing” — albeit with different perspectives and lots of productive arguments. Simpson leads a group using optogenetics to trace the neural circuitry that gives rise to specific, hard-wired responses — grooming behaviour, for example — inD. melanogaster. Comparing the detailed structure of many such circuits, she says, should begin to reveal the general principles behind them2.
Another early recruit was Eric Betzig, a physicist who had begun working at Bell Labs during the late 1980s, when the facility was still investigating everything from neuroscience to antimatter. Impatient with the steadily declining role of basic research at the labs, Betzig left to work at his father's machine-tool company in 1994. Soon after deciding to get back into research, he joined Janelia Farm in 2006 to work on a broad range of imaging technologies.
“What attracted me was the same thing that had attracted me about Bell,” he says. “All the resources you need, and no pressure to publish. I won't do science if I can't do it under those terms.” Before arriving at Janelia, Betzig had been developing an imaging technique, called photoactivated localization microscopy, or PALM, that he created in collaboration with Harald Hess, a physicist who is now also at Janelia Farm. It uses image-processing algorithms pioneered by astronomers to detect the position of single fluorescent molecules with nanometre accuracy3. Since starting at Janelia, Betzig has developed three more imaging techniques designed to help biologists peer deeper than before into the layers of living cells, with higher resolution and with less damage to them in the process.
Janelia Farm is definitely not for everybody, says Rubin. “I've tried to make it irresistible for a small fraction of people,” he says — researchers who are confident enough to go without tenure, who don't mind the remote location or the six-person limit on group size, and who do want to work with their own hands.
Plenty of researchers do seem to fit that description. At present, Janelia Farm has 20 research-group leaders, who are evaluated for renewal on a five-year cycle. The first round of evaluations begins next spring — a process Simpson calls “terrifying”, if only because it's new and no one knows for sure how it will work. In addition, 26 fellows at various stages of non-renewable five-year stints are working at the facility, as are more than 100 visiting scientists. With additional group members and support staff, the total number of employees at Janelia Farm comes to 424.
Yet the place can still feel almost empty. “That's the first thing you notice,” says Robert Tjian, a biochemist who was once Rubin's colleague at Berkeley and who succeeded Cech as HHMI president in 2009. “We probably have another 100 to 150 scientists to put in the building before it's even close to being full.”

Keeping creative

Those spaces are empty in part because it has taken longer to recruit scientists than Rubin initially thought. The most common problem for prospective recruits is the six-member limit for research groups, he says. The remote location has been a smaller hurdle than feared, but it has been a factor.
Rubin and his colleagues have done their best to fight that isolation. Janelia's visitor programme brings scientists in for weeks or even months at a time, and the campus hosts about a dozen scientific conferences every year. Nonetheless, the remoteness of the campus is a major ongoing challenge, says Carla Shatz, a neuroscientist who directs the interdisciplinary Bio-X programme at Stanford University in California, and who serves on the Janelia Farm advisory committee. “Janelia has to think about how it can create excitement and creativity and innovation in a location that doesn't have ready access to a medical school, an engineering school, biology, physics and chemistry departments or an undergraduate student body,” she says.
A related challenge is that of keeping the research programme intellectually fresh. The tight focus on imaging and neurocircuitry has been useful in the initial phase, says Tjian, “so that everyone understood what Janelia Farm was”. But in the long run, he says, the place will stagnate unless it can broaden out and give scientists the freedom to follow new opportunities as they arise.
That is another reason Janelia still has so many empty spaces: they allow for expansion. On the basis of a series of planning workshops held earlier this year, Rubin has begun to hire group leaders in the fields of cell biology, evolutionary biology, structural biology and chemistry — each of which has some overlap with neurocircuitry but will also extend the campus's programme in new directions.
Looking back over Janelia Farm's first five years, Rubin says he is very satisfied. “We showed that we could go from an empty building to a functioning lab, that we could hire first-rate people, and that they could come here and work on interesting problems,” he says. “All the things people said we were certain to fail at, we accomplished.”
But what happens next? Can Janelia Farm do 'great science' during the next 5 to 10 years? Will it pass Rubin's deletion test? Can it rewrite the introductory biology texts (Cech's favourite definition of great science), or foster “a couple of programmes that create a whole new direction” (Tjian's favourite)?
That is the great unanswerable question. As Simpson says, “you can't engineer great science. You just have to create the conditions that make it possible, and see what happens.”
Nature
 
479,
 
284–286
 
()
 
doi:10.1038/479284a

References

  1. Rubin, G. M. Cell 125209212 (2006).
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  2. Simpson, J. H. Adv. Genet. 6579143 (2009).
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  3. Betzig, E. et alScience 31316421645 (2006).
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  4. Pfeiffer, B. D. et alGenetics 186735755 (2010).
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