Washington

Clayton (left) and Rubin: expected to shake up management of the largest US medical charity. Credit: P. FETTERS/HHMI

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the largest biomedical research charity in the United States, has appointed a management team that is expected to shake up the institute's portfolio in the new year.

Gerry Rubin, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, will join the institute on 1 January as vice-president for biomedical research. He will team up with David Clayton, who will become vice-president for science development.

The two appointments were announced last week by Tom Cech, the University of Colorado Nobel laureate who takes over as president of the HHMI in January. Cech said the appointments to replace Max Cowan, the institute's retiring scientific director, signalled the expanding scope of its activities.

“Max is irreplaceable, so we've decided to divide things up a bit differently,” says Cech, adding that the decision reflects the continuing expansion of the institute's portfolio. “If we just planned to maintain what we have, we wouldn't need two people.”

The HHMI's annual expenditure has grown rapidly in recent years, from around $300 million in 1994 to more than $500 million last year, as the stock-market boom has fed an endowment now worth some $10 billion. Four-fifths of the expenditure supports an elite of 300 salaried investigators — all biomedical scientists at US universities — with the rest distributed as grants for undergraduate and postgraduate education, and for research overseas.

Cech says Rubin will take over supervision of the investigators, while Clayton will be responsible for “strategic planning” of the institute's activities. Clayton is currently a senior scientific officer at the HHMI and was formerly associate director of the Beckman Center at Stanford University in California.

Rubin will maintain his laboratory at Berkeley, although it will contract sharply once it has completed its current project to sequence the genome of the fruit fly Drosophila in collaboration with Celera (see Nature 401, 729; 1999).

“I've felt for a while that it is time to take on a more administrative role,” he says. “I enjoy policy, and this is the ideal job because you don't have to worry about where the money's coming from.”

Cech is also keeping his laboratory at the University of Colorado. Both Rubin and Cech plan to spend about 20 per cent of their time on research.

Although all three say that no decisions have been made about new directions at the HHMI, Cech suggests that the institute will explore new ways of encouraging top-quality clinical research in the United States, and is likely to build on plans already announced to appoint investigators in bioinformatics.

But they expect that such decisions will be made quickly once they take over operation of the institute in January. “I don't know what will be announced, but I'd hope that the first year of the administration will be an interesting one,” says Clayton.

Cowan, who has steered the institute's scientific programmes with an iron hand for the past 12 years, says he plans to pursue his keen personal interest in the history of neuroscience during his retirement.

Purnell Choppin, the outgoing president, will remain at the HHMI's headquarters at Chevy Chase, Maryland, writing an official history of the institute. There are conflicting views as to whether the institute's secretive and eccentric billionaire founder set it up primarily as a medical research institute or a tax dodge.