To paraphrase John Donne, no institution is an island. But Salvador Moncada, director of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research in London, feels that cultivating self-sufficiency can be a virtue. The independently funded institute opened on the University College London campus in 1997. Three years later it moved into its own building, a red-brick Victorian edifice. It has since set up its own technology-transfer office and created four companies that between them have raised £100 million (US$160 million). Now, the institute is taking another step forwards: it is spinning off its own contract-research division.

All of these moves have meant job creation and training, particularly in medicinal chemistry. “The need for medicinal chemists is so big, we've got people knocking on our doors morning, noon and night,” says Moncada. The contract-research division is helping the drug-development industry, providing funds to fuel the expansion of the institute's medicinal-chemistry department from 20 to 30 people, and offering more training opportunities for students and postdocs.

Moncada says he has found that the more the institute exerts its autonomy, the greater the need for its researchers to work with each other. Ironically, the building that houses them, a former hospital, was designed as a cruciform supposedly to avoid infectious diseases from travelling from wing to wing. “That's quite a problem if you want to create interactions,” says Moncada. So to encourage intellectual cross-pollination, he has had to do some social engineering, which includes providing “the best coffee around” and placing chemists doing pharmacology next to geneticists doing microarrays.

Such moves ensure that the Wolfson Institute is an island that people will want to journey to, as well as communicate with.