Wealthy New Lab Aims to Capture Dreams, Literally
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

ASHBURN, Virginia (Reuters) - Gerald Rubin is looking for someone who
can take a picture of a thought.

To do it, he and colleagues are harnessing the powerful force of
cold, hard cash -- Howard Hughes' cash, to be exact.

They are building a new $400 million laboratory in the green
countryside outside Washington, D.C., and hope to attract the
brightest and most unconventional minds in science to find a way to
look into a person's brain and see what it is doing.

And they want to take their time doing it. "In a 100-year timeframe
we want to understand human consciousness," said Rubin.

Rubin and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute -- one of
the world's richest philanthropies with an endowment worth $11.3
billion -- are approaching this ticklish problem backwards. They have
bought a 280-acre farm in Ashburn, Virginia, and are building a new
kind of research campus.

Only now, halfway through its construction, are they settling on what
kind of research they want to do and looking for the people to do it.

"We are (like) a biotechnology company whose product is new knowledge
and which has infinitely patient investors," Rubin told reporters on
a recent tour, comparing the foundation to a corporation.

How did they settle on imaging thought?

"We wanted to pick an important biomedical problem but we wanted to
pick a problem that wasn't easily addressed at academic campuses."

One area that might meet these criteria was the question of how brain
cells store and process information.

Rubin and the other founders of Janelia Farm -- HHMI President Thomas
Cech and chief scientific officer David Clayton -- polled scientists
on what they thought the biggest problem in future biomedical
research would be.

"They all say imaging," Rubin said. As with all "basic" scientific
research, the researchers do not know what they might discover or its
potential applications.

While biologists have a rough idea of what goes on in a cell, current
scans all record the action indirectly, by measuring glucose uptake,
for instance.

CAPTURING DREAMS

What if you could take a picture of a brain cell at the very moment
it recorded a thought?

Trying to do this will require the expertise of neurobiologists,
physicists, molecular biologists, chemists, geneticists, instrument
designers and computer scientists.

Those who are interested will hear a beguiling call: "We'll give you
money, lots of money, and we won't ask too many questions," Rubin
said.

Hughes, who founded the Hughes Aircraft Company and helped turn TWA
in a major airline, founded HHMI in 1953. Hughes Aircraft went to the
Institute after his death in 1976.

Rubin said the HHMI board of trustees want to act like venture
capitalists.

"Venture capitalists will assume that many projects won't pay off but
that some will pay big," Rubin said.

Janelia Farm will operate on the same assumption.

"If someone tells me they are doing something with a 90 percent
chance of success, I'll tell them they are not being creative enough -
- to go find something more adventuresome," Rubin said.

To some degree this has been the philosophy of the HHMI, a virtual
institute that funds scientists already working at universities
across the country.

Janelia Farm will take the anti-academic approach even further. Rubin
said the plan is to do away with tenure, and publish-or-perish
mentalities that he says can block collaboration and long-term
thinking.

FREEDOM TO BE DIFFERENT

The foundation's deep pockets allow considerable flexibility. "In a
typical university, you have to convince a third party of what you
want to do," Rubin said. "We are not going to take a penny of money
from anybody else."

About 10 percent, or 300, of HHMI's 3,000 scientists will eventually
work at Janelia Farm, Rubin said.

The HHMI team hired New York architect Rafael Vinoly to design a
campus on the site, chosen because it was close to Dulles
International Airport and HHMI's headquarters in nearby Chevy Chase,
Maryland.

The new center, 40 minutes by car from Washington, is due to be
finished in March 2006.

The laboratories were designed with nothing specific in mind. "We
looked and looked at every instrument scientists used and
asked, 'What's the biggest one' and then we made the rooms big enough
to hold it," Rubin said.

The campus includes a 96-room hotel and apartment complex. The aim is
to encourage sabbaticals, short-term collaborations and casual visits.

Built like a terrace into a hillside that gently slopes to the
Potomac River, the building has wide glass corridors to let in plenty
of natural light and a view across a flood plain where no one else
can ever build anything.

But will scientists working with no deadline and little oversight be
tempted to spend their days gazing across the green landscape instead
of striving for genius?

"That's a risk we are willing to take," Rubin said.

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