washington

Blumberg: will lead a ‘virtual institute’.

The US space agency NASA has appointed Nobel prizewinning biochemist Baruch ‘Barry’ Blumberg to head its new Astrobiology Institute, and neuroscientist Kathie Olsen as the agency's new chief scientist. Both moves will strengthen NASA's position in the biological sciences.

The 73-year-old Blumberg, who won the 1976 Nobel prize in medicine for his work in developing the hepatitis-B vaccine, teaches medicine and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and is an adviser to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

He will move to the Ames Research Center near San Francisco in September to head NASA's year-old ‘virtual institute’, a collective of scientists from 11 institutions investigating the origin of life and its possible existence beyond Earth.

Although he became aware of the field only a few years ago, Blumberg is among a handful of Nobel prizewinners who have been enthusiastic participants in a series of workshops at Ames to lay the foundations of astrobiology.

Blumberg says his unfamiliarity with previous debates on the topic may be an advantage: “I can be non-partisan.” His appointment raises hopes that the institute will be the kind of intellectual incubator envisaged by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin.

The search for a director “took longer than we had hoped”, says the head of one member institution. High-speed videoconferencing capability has also been slow to materialize, hindering the Astrobiology Institute's role as an experiment in long-distance collaboration. Now the pieces appear to be falling into place.

Olsen, holder of a series of administrative jobs at the National Science Foundation since the mid-1980s, lacks Blumberg's status as a researcher. But her appointment fulfils Goldin's long-standing promise to appoint a biologist as his chief science adviser.

Traditionally, the position has had little authority, and has been vacant for almost three years. Budget and programme responsibility lies with NASA's three science offices: space science, Earth science, and life and microgravity science. Part of Olsen's job will be to broker differences among the strong personalities who head these offices.

But she will have Goldin's support as she attempts to raise the profile of life-science research at NASA. The agency hopes to increase spending in two areas: astrobiology and ‘bio-astronautics’, a blend of operational medicine for astronaut crews and research into human adaptation to space flight.

Frank Sulzman of the office of life and microgravity sciences recently told NASA's external advisory committee that the agency wants to shift from simply “taking inventory” of activities in biology to augmenting the budget for ground-based laboratory work and experiments in space.

For example, NASA will soon announce the winners of grants in “biology-inspired” space technologies. These could range from advanced life-support techniques to ‘smart’ materials based on living systems.

Blumberg credits Goldin with the vision to link NASA's space research with advances in genomics and other life sciences. After decades of wondering about the existence of life in the Universe, he says, scientists can now conduct experiments and collect real data. A believer in the value of inductive reasoning, he says astrobiology will have the advantage of being “unencumbered by hypothesis”.

Running the institute, with its “fairly complicated organizational scheme”, will be a challenge, he admits. But he looks forward to working with astronomers, biologists, chemists and other researchers, and to attracting collaborators not just from US institutions, but from other parts of the world. “My big job,” he says, “is to get scientists interested in the field.”