The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is launching an open competition for up to 30 new awards today. The winners of these coveted HHMI Investigator Awards, worth around US$1 million a year, will be announced next spring. All told, they represent a $200-million, five-year investment by the HHMI. The awards are renewable if the work passes muster with the HHMI ‘s scientific reviewers.

Robert Tjian, who this month completes his third year as HHMI president, spoke to Nature about the awards, the HHMI's other new initiatives and the funding environment for biomedical scientists.

Robert Tjian Credit: James Kegley

Why are you launching these awards now?

Because of attrition — just to stay even we have to launch them every once in a while. But the more profound issue is, we would like to give as many investigators as possible the opportunity to be part of the Hughes organization.

You will notice that 30 slots is not a large number. We could have done twice that many. But we decided that it would be better for the community for us to do two competitions in a shorter time span than do one and then wait five years. The next one will probably come within less than 3 years.

What do these new awards do that’s unique — that isn’t already being done by, say, the National Institutes of Health? 

Our philosophy is that we hire people, not projects. It’s a very different sort of approach to basic research.

You mentioned basic biology research in particular. Why?

It’s getting harder and harder to find sources of funding for people doing basic biology, as opposed to applied or translational work. If you ask what’s the best thing for the nation in terms of medical research, my answer would be: do way more and better basic research, because development of therapeutic drugs is all dependent on knowing far more than we do about how the body works.

In your last competition in 2007, applicants had to have landed their first tenure-track job 4 to 10 years earlier. This time, it’s 5 to 15 years. Why the change?

Our requirements vary almost every time we launch these. This is probably about as late in a scientist’s career as we have gone in a long time. It’s very hard to know where the sweet spot is. When is the time in somebody’s career where HHMI resources will make the biggest difference, have a transformative impact on their research? It’s not usually going to happen during the first few years that you’re an independent investigator. And it’s not likely to happen when you’re 25 years in.

In 2007, just under 21% of HHMI investigators were female. What are the numbers today, and are you making progress on recruiting more women?

We currently have 79 women out of 340 investigators — about 23%. This is a conversation that [vice-president and chief scientific officer] Jack Dixon and I have every round of reviews and every round of competitions. And it seems to be holding pretty steady somewhere between 20 and 25%.

Are you on track to launch your new open-access online journal with the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust by this summer? And does it have a name yet?

Yes. It’s called eLife. The most important thing was finding a chief editor, Randy Schekman, and a managing executive editor, Mark Patterson, previously director of publishing at the Public Library of Science. And we recently appointed around 18 senior editors, all practising scientists. The model is that all editorial decisions are going to be made by practising scientists. We’ll make a formal announcement, maybe in the next month, about when we’re going to start receiving submissions.

You are phasing out research programmes abroad that supported roughly 100 investigators at all career stages. How do you respond to the criticism that this leaves them high and dry?

Yes. Those research programmes have been phased out or are in the process of being phased out. But we just completed a spectacular open competition for early-career international scientists. We selected 28 researchers from 12 countries. And we are thinking about announcing a senior international programme.