Washington

In a radical change of direction, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will this week announce plans to build a $500 million research campus near Washington DC.

The creation of a permanent research base is a new move for Hughes, the largest medical research charity in the United States. Until now, it has concentrated on supporting an élite of individual investigators based at US universities.

Watch this space: Cech (below) wants to keep the new campus 'fresh'. Credit: STEWART BROTHERS / PAUL FETTERS

The campus will be built on a green-field site near Washington Dulles Airport in northern Virginia. HHMI officials envisage that collaborations there between biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers will specialize in developing new research tools. “It is at the interface between the disciplines that the sparks are going to fly,” says Tom Cech, HHMI's president. The campus is expected to open its doors by 2005.

The Howard Hughes Investigator programme — which supports 348 researchers to the tune of around $1 million a year each — has worked well, most observers say. Its researchers include many of the United States' most eminent life scientists. And the absence of any permanent research infrastructure has shielded Hughes from criticisms of empire-building or from any sense of stagnation.

But Hughes needs to expand — it is required by law to spend 3.5% of its fast-growing endowment on medical research each year. And biomedical researchers' growing appetite for sophisticated and expensive research tools has convinced HHMI officials that there is an opportunity for a vibrant new centre specializing in the development and use of such tools.

“Ramping up the number of principal investigators [to 348] was the right strategy for the 1990s,” says Cech. “But biology is now switching over, to benefit from bigger installations.”

HHMI officials mention Pat Brown, a Hughes investigator and geneticist at Stanford University, as the sort of researcher who might be induced to join the new establishment. Brown has pioneered the development of microarray techniques in genetics. David Clayton, the vice-president for scientific development at HHMI, says it will attract “people who really enjoy bringing state-of-the-art technology to bear” on scientific problems.

As well as working on research tools, the campus will serve as what Gerry Rubin, Hughes vice-president for research, calls a “research hotel”, where teams of visiting scholars, who may or may not be Hughes investigators, can spend time together working on projects of interest. The groups could come “for a few months, or even a couple of years”, says Rubin. “No university can hold space open for that.”

The facility will be built on a recently acquired 281-acre site. It will house around 24 principal investigators and up to 300 support staff, plus visiting scientists. Hughes has put aside $500 million for the project over 10 years, including planning, construction and $50 million a year for operations after 2005. A director will be appointed about a year before operations begin.

Hughes officials say that investigators at the campus will not have tenure, although their five-year appointments will be renewable. “We've spent a lot of time discussing how to keep it fresh,” says Cech. “We think we can keep people moving in and out of the place.”

Cech and Rubin arrived at HHMI at the start of 2000 (see Nature 402, 334–335; 1999) and have since been working on a new direction for the charity. The announcement is its central component. “This is something that the new leadership group here has cooked up,” says Cech.