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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is set to provide a major infusion of equipment and technical staff to help biologists working at five synchrotron light sources operated by the Department of Energy (DOE).

Harold Varmus, director of the NIH, told a meeting last week of health research lobbyists: “We'll be making a substantial contribution” to the synchrotron facilities “in the future, and perhaps this year”.

The NIH contribution may be as much as $20 million in the current financial year, which ends in September 1999. It is expected to help equip beamlines at the synchrotrons, to upgrade some of the facilities, and to pay for support staff to help structural biologists use them.

It has been estimated that a capital investment of $12 million and an extra $5.5 million in annual operating costs would double the amount of time available on the beamline for structural biologists at the synchrotrons (see Nature 393, 3; 1998).

The increased NIH contribution confirms that the biomedical research agency, which last month received a mammoth $2 billion funding increase from the Congress, is ready to help the cash-strapped DOE with facility operations.

The DOE built most of the ‘big science’ instruments in the United States, including the synchrotrons, chiefly for use by physicists and materials scientists. But an increasing proportion of their users are NIH-supported biologists.

A panel of officials established in the spring to look into the question of inter-agency cooperation on synchrotron operations recently sent its report to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. The agencies involved are now trying to implement its findings during the current financial year.

Marvin Cassman, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH, says: “I do anticipate we'll be making a substantial contribution”. But he adds that its precise value remains “a little unclear” and that he is “still not certain we can do it this year”. NIH is currently scrambling to allocate its unexpectedly large budget increase.

The facilities that will benefit from the news include the Advanced Photon Source at the Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois; the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory in California; the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at Stanford, also in California; and the National Science Foundation's synchrotron at Cornell University, New York State.