An experimental "farm" takes shape

Gerald M. Rubin has mixed emotions when he walks the 689-acre campus in rural Virginia where the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is building a $500 million haven for scientific research. The director of this ambitious experiment, a Boston native and MIT grad, said he's excited to see the fruit of four years of hard work, ''but I'm also thinking, 'Boy, I better make this work because look at how much money we're spending.' "

Last week, Rubin took a major step toward making the Janelia Farm Research Center work, naming the first seven researchers who will take up residence for at least six years each when the facility opens in late 2006. The scientists, including Nikolaus Grigorieff of Brandeis University and Massachusetts General Hospital, will lead groups of up to six researchers with no need to raise research funds. The goal is to encourage them to take risks and focus on projects that require more than five years to complete -- a model that has largely disappeared as labs become more results-oriented. Broadly, the teams will focus on understanding how nerve cells in the brain process information and on developing new ways to create images of biological systems such as the brain at work.

Grigorieff, a physicist who has spent the last decade creating 3-D images of protein structures inside cells, is particularly interested in visualizing what happens at the synapses connecting one nerve cell to the next. ''I'm coming to learn about a new field," he said. Other researchers who will join him at Janelia Farm include Dmitri B. Chklovskii of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Sean R. Eddy of Washington University in St. Louis, and Julia H. Simpson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rubin, a prominent geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Howard Hughes in 2000, compared the process of luring tenured scientists to Janelia Farm to signing Major League Baseball players. ''The same people we want to hire everyone else wants to hire as well," he said. He hopes more top scientists will consider coming to Janelia Farm when the center begins hiring more researchers this fall.

From band leader to big wheel in science
John Warner, a chemistry professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, had met a US president before. But his visit to the Oval Office in May was a bit more awe-inspiring than his 1980 meeting with Jimmy Carter when Warner represented the Quincy High School marching band. This time, Warner received a Presidential Award for Excellence for his role in pioneering ''green chemistry," in which students learn to minimize the environmental impact of the chemicals and other research materials they use.

Warner said President Bush ''pretty much held court and talked" about past presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, while he and the other award winners visited. ''It was pretty cool," said Warner, who also will receive a $10,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his education work. ''It was a very odd moment to just be standing there in the Oval Office. It was something I never thought I'd do." The earlier meeting with President Carter, during a campaign visit to Boston, was exciting, too, he said, but ''I was just a kid."

Joslin takes vision screening nationwide
An eye clinic in Warwick, R.I., will be the test site for a new effort to reduce diabetes-related blindness, as the Joslin Diabetes Center begins offering its proprietary vision screening to communities across the country. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in the United States, largely because so many people with diabetes aren't screened for the condition, which is treatable in its early stages.

Under the agreement with Koch Eye Associates, Joslin will provide the technology to get images of patients' retinas; the images are then sent to Joslin to look for signs of blood vessel damage, the hallmark of diabetic retinopathy. Otherwise, the disease, which causes 12,000 to 24,000 cases of blindness annually, has no symptoms in its early stages.
SCOTT ALLEN