Back to Front PageVOLUME 6, NUMBER 4

New Biomedical Research Centers Cut Across Traditional Departmental Boundaries

By Barbara A. Gabriel

David Clayton, Ph.D., says that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's new biomedical science center will accommodate collaborative research teams that will be given access to the center's high-tech labs.

On medical campuses across the country, the construction of biomedical research centers is attracting big money. The University of Missouri-Columbia recently announced a $15 million federal grant that will complete funding for theirs. The University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) has said that the largest single gift ever received by that institution will help fund the construction of theirs. Michigan State University (MSU) has received $26 million in tobacco settlement revenue to develop theirs. And a $105 million grant from Lily Endowment Inc. will allow Indiana University (IU) to create theirs.

These and other institutions are positioning themselves to be on the cutting edge of the era of "big science" being heralded by biomedical researchers across the country in the wake of the mapping of the human genome. Aca-demic medical centers nationwide are investing millions of dollars to create collaborative, high-tech laboratories that will pool the expertise of their traditional basic sciences departments to meet the challenges presented by the vast amount of information being revealed by the new reality of genome sequencing.

The University of Missouri-Columbia's Life Sciences Center, UNMC's Research Center of Excellence, the Michigan Center for Structural Biology at MSU, and the Indiana Genomics Initiative at IU are all to some extent breaking down traditional departmental boundaries to allow scientists who have worked solo in their own laboratories to join forces with colleagues they previously saw only outside the lab to create the new collaborative science demanded by the emerging field of genomics.

Inherently Interdisciplinary

"There's absolutely no question that the biomedical sciences are becoming inherently interdisciplinary," affirms Thomas J. Kelly, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of Hopkins' newly conceived $125 million Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences (IBBS).

"The wealth of new human genome data and advances in biotechnology - such as techniques that allow biologists to screen hundreds of molecules for a particular property in a single day - are blurring traditional boundaries of the basic sciences," Dr. Kelly says. "We're starting to tackle the challenge of understanding how sets of genes interact with one another rather than focusing on single genes and proteins. In order to do that, we're going to have to bring together people from different disciplines, from multiple aspects of not only biology but also physics and chemistry."

When complete, Hopkins' IBBS will link the departments of biological chemistry, biomedical engineering, biophysics and biophysical chemistry, molecular biology and genetics, molecular cell biology, neuroscience, pharmacology and molecular sciences, and physiology. "We're not really abolishing our departments," explains Dr. Kelly. "But we are bringing them together under one umbrella with the idea that this umbrella - this organization - will spark new initiatives that cut across all departments, and accordingly develop and build the infrastructure that's necessary for this type of science."

Terry Magnuson, Ph.D., head of UNC's campus-wide genome sciences initiative, says the program will encompass each of the university's health affairs schools as well as the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Information and Library Science, and the School of Law.

Terry Magnuson, Ph.D., head of the $245 million campus-wide genome sciences initiative at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, explains the magnitude of the type of research possible in this post-genomic era: "With the human genome sequenced, we've now moved on to the next challenge - determining the functions of genes, both individually and, more importantly, collectively. Since there are only 35,000 genes in the human genome, they have to work in concert and in many different combinations. Determining function is going to be more difficult than getting the sequence itself."

To meet that challenge, UNC is amassing the funds necessary to build a multidisciplinary initiative called the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, which will be housed in a 100,000-square-foot human biology research building currently under construction. The initiative will pool the talents of UNC's five health affairs schools - medicine, pharmacy, nursing, dentistry, and public health - as well as its College of Arts and Sciences, School of Information and Library Science, and School of Law.

"We must deal with not only science and scientific discoveries but also health care issues, the business enterprise, technology development and transfer, bioethics, and the legal and social impact of genomics discoveries on public policy," explains Dr. Magnuson, who is also the Sarah Graham Kenan professor and founding chair of the Department of Genetics at UNC.

He says that new faculty positions will be assigned to the center and then divided up among the center's founding academic partners. "The goal is for faculty to have their academic homes but to interact in ways that produce new projects and technologies facilitated by their work in the center. The center will provide coordination across campus so that rather than duplicating our efforts, we will be moving forward within a core infrastructure."

This idea of creating a collaborative setting in which biologists, geneticists, and social scientists feel equally at home is the cornerstone of what is perhaps the most ambitious interdisciplinary biomedical research endeavor to date - the recently announced plan by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to build a $500 million biomedical science center on a 281-acre site outside of Washington, D.C., in Loudon County, Va. David Clayton, Ph.D., vice president for science development at HHMI, explains that a major goal of the project is to have space reserved for non-permanent researchers from different disciplines and institutions who will compete for funding and the use of technology that HHMI intends to incorporate into its new campus.

Planned for full operation in 2005, the HHMI biomedical science center will house the expensive, complex technology increasingly necessary for post-genomic study. In addition to being a place where researchers can come together during sabbaticals or leaves of absence from their own institutions, the center will house 20-30 permanent investigators. HHMI has announced that the new center will seek proposals that concentrate on cutting-edge scientific and technological goals, and will give preference to projects that bring together diverse individuals and expertise from different environments.

Dr. Clayton foresees the breaking down of the boundaries separating traditional departments in schools of medicine as an inevitable result of the birth of "big science" made possible by genome sequencing. However, he also acknowledges the arguments against it. "There are people who feel that maintaining departmental structures is important in upholding academic standards," he explains. "The most common argument - and there is some validity in it - is based on concerns about curricula. If you don't have a biochemistry department, what will happen to the quality of teaching in biochemistry?"

He counters that argument by discussing the reality of the world outside of the college campus. "Professional meetings and conferences aren't arranged along the lines of departmental categories. Everything is thematic," Dr. Clayton says. "The economy of business is going to increasingly rely on collaboration between people of different specialties. It's no longer the case that you can take something like electron microscopy and make that your total career. Things have changed dramatically, and I don't see how traditional departmental structures will survive in this new world."

Neither does Richard J. Samulski, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Pharmacology at UNC and director of its Gene Therapy Center. "Big science means joining expertise from different areas," he explains. "Different departments and schools of study are no longer going to have boundaries; they are all going to be part of the same structure."

A Threat to Individual Scholarship?

Dr. Samulski also perceives the collaborative research required by big science as a fundamental challenge to the traditional system of promotion within medical schools in which first authorship of papers is key to obtaining recognition and, ultimately, tenure. When work on a 10-month lab project yields a paper that gives credit to a long list of individuals, how do individual investigators prove the validity of their personal contribution?

"For now, the young investigator is going to have to straddle two fences," offers Dr. Samulski. "He or she is going to have to play in the community arena and then independently do more to distinguish himself or herself in order to follow the traditional track leading to acknowledgement and promotion. But somewhere down the line, our community will have to develop a different model for evaluation. Somehow we have to value the whole and say it couldn't have been done without the contribution of many individuals, while simultaneously rewarding those most responsible."

Dr. Kelly agrees on the difficulty of the problem and admits that although academia has recognized it, there is no obvious solution. "There's no question that post-genomic science is going to change the way we think about promotion and academic advancement," he affirms. "You can see it already in the very large consortia that are involved in cloning disease-related genes in which the resulting papers will appear with many, many authors. We're still looking to promote that individual who has done something exceptional, so we're going to have to find ways in these large consortia of identifying the people who truly made the project feasible."

But Dr. Magnuson maintains that the collaborative activity of technologically intensive core laboratories that can serve many different scientists may mean the end of the individual, department-specific lab, but it does not mean that individual achievement will no longer be recognized. "A good core director will be able to get people from diverse areas to interact and promote the emergence of new projects. But I think that everyone will still get their proper credit; this system still allows for a lead investigator and a collaborative investigator, and they will take different roles depending upon who puts more work into the project."

Leaders of biomedical research centers popping up on medical school campuses across the country do agree that a new era in the basic sciences is at hand - an era made possible by genome sequencing and the endless possibilities of manipulating the concurrent information deluge in ways that can lead to understanding disease on a molecular level.

"It's an exciting time," says Dr. Samulski. "The new era of big science is going to be a roller coaster ride, but after you do it a few times, you know where the bumps and the dips are and you get used to it. It ends up becoming part of the norm. I think once we go through that transition we'll all be on firmer ground."

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Wednesday, 31-May-2006 16:03:10 EDT