Of course I’m talking about the biotech economic engines in the Bay Area and Boston respectively. These regions have seen a powerful synergy develop between research universities and the various components of the biotech business ranging from genomics to informatics. In each of these areas, the tech industry has also played a key role in economic development.

Other regions have attempted to create similar sandboxes (Silicon Shire in the UK and La Jolla come to mind) and have seen some real success, however the original two regions remain the most salient.

What is interesting about the National Capitol Region in this respect is the following: a unique combination of federal (NIH and NSF), private (Howard Hughes’ Janelia Farm, Inova Health Systems, Howard University, Medstar) and large public Carnegie Research I educational institutions (Mason and University of Maryland College Park) intersecting with a burgeoning tech sector that is increasingly interested in biotech.

I believe that any attempt to blindly emulate Silicon Valley or the Route 128 corridor would have great difficulty succeeding–anywhere. However, I do think the notion of building an economic engine based on an intersection of biosciences (writ very large) and tech, nourished by federal and private R&D expenditures could be exactly what is needed to create a new version of these extraordinary economic success stories.

Jim

The MRI is being ramped up this afternoon. If all goes well we should have a 3T field strength with proper homogeneity later today. Secondly, the pile driving is now complete on the Krasnow Expansion Project. Next stage will be the foundation work.

To my mind, Memorial Day, marks the begining of the summer, even if it’s a tad early as far as the calendar is concerned. At an Institute like Krasnow, this is generally a time when the pace of activities are somewhat reduced, as many of our scientists are on travel. My own summer science travel will involve a trip to Santa Fe (home of our sister institute), a great apes research center in Iowa and two weeks in Woods Hole at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

This summer is slightly unusual for the Institute in that the construction will continue a pace. We’ll make a renewed effort to summarize where we are in terms of the Expansion laboratories, so that folks here at least will have some idea of where we are in the overall project.

Jim

So here are two pictures taken from my trip last week. The first picture is of the Highlands coastline facing the Atlantic. The odd shaped island is Eigg (pronounced “egg”). The second is a picture of Ian and Loreen who were without question superb and very friendly staff members on our train, The Royal Scotsman–they are offering us refreshments as we return from an outing along the western coast.

There can be little doubt that when science becomes nationalistic–that
is, when international scientific exchange declines–for what ever
reason, then the scientific enterprise writ large is damaged.

During my stay in the UK last week, it become very clear that, at the
moment, feelings about the United States are quite negative. This
sensibility seems to run both broad and deep and, should it continue,
will inevitably put at risk the extraordinarily important network of
research collaborations, student exchange and international scientific
dialog.

I can’t speak personally, but I suspect that what I saw in the UK is
present to greater or lesser degree in other nations that actively
participate in the scientific enterprise.

The question then becomes how to manage the current state of affairs
from the standpoint of science so as to minimize the damage and the
risk. The answer, to my mind, is that it becomes even more important to
nurture and protect these threads that make up the network of
international scientific exchange.

At the institutional level this can be reified by formal and informal
ties to sister centers across the world. At the level of scientific
publication, it can mean actively recruiting manuscripts from
international authors. From the standpoint of research support, it means
that we should be redoubling our efforts to support initiatives such as
the the Human Frontier Science Program (www.hfsp.org) or the NIH Fogarty
Center (www.fic.nih.gov) which exist to support international
collaborative science. Finally, on the individual level, it implies
treasuring our scientific relationships that extend beyond national
boundaries. In the end, it may be those individual relationships that
sustain the enterprise as a whole.

Jim

I had a delightful trip to the Highlands of Scotland this past week. I’ll post some pictures later. Now it’s back to serious blogging. As I prepare to begin my second five year term as Krasnow Director next July, this blog will be playing a critical role in developing a substantive agenda for the growth of the Institute.

Jim

Well, another academic year is coming to a close this weekend with George Mason’s commencement exercises. This Saturday, 6803 students will be receiving degrees at Mason’s Patriot Center. The commencement speaker will be Scott Cowen, President of Tulane University.

For Krasnow, this has been a very active year: both in construction, the acquisition of our 3T MRI and changes among our faculty. I am really looking forward to welcoming Rob Axtell, Nathalia Peixoto and Jim Thompson as new principal investigators at the Institute with the commencement of the Fall term. And over the summer, I’ll be asking each of them to serve as guest bloggers at some point so as to describe their research foci. And we will have hired an MR Technician in the next couple of weeks–this individual will play the key role in making things work smoothly at our brain imaging center. I’d also like to welcome our new receptionist, Joey Carls.

Outside my office window today, the earthmoving equipment is filling the air with the sounds of diesel engines–we’re now hard at work on creating the extra 12,500 square feet of lab space that will enable Krasnow to continue its rapid expansion over the next five year period.

Tomorrow I leave for about a week in Scotland. We’ll give the blog a rest over that period and pick up where we left off when I return.

Jim

This time I link to our colleagues from Charlottesville for their excellent advice.

I have a couple of my own rules of thumb:

Be aware of the differential advantages of choosing someone who is quite junior (perhaps an assistant professor) vis a vis a more senior mentor who leads a large group.

The more junior mentor will have potentially much more time for the trainee, which is really extremely important for learning the basic skills of science, from experimental design through data analysis. However, because of their own usually untenured status, they may turn out to be extremely aggressive about first authorship. Thus there is potentially a situational competitiveness between trainee and mentor–a big negative.

The more senior mentor (aka a lab chief) will have much less time. She or he will tend to run the lab in a more delegated fashion and perhaps lab meetings will be the only opportunity for face-to-face contact with the boss. In these situations, the lucky trainee will often connect with some senior post-doc in the lab who will de facto fulfill the “hands on” role of the more junior mentor described above. The good thing about these situations is that a more senior lab chief often has a much more generous attitude towards authorships and even promoting the independence of the trainee. Remember, this type of mentor already has attained significant success in their career and so there is little or no incentive to compete with the trainee for credit.

One other characteristic of the more senior mentor: they probably have the ability to pick up the phone and secure the trainee a well-placed next job. This of course is very important.

Jim

One of the most serious responsibilities in science is mentorship–that is the professional training (including above and beyond science) that a senior investigator ethically owes to one’s trainees. I link above to University of Michigan’s standards, which I think worked pretty well for me.

A key component is the notion of appropriately crediting a trainee’s research accomplishments with the overall goal of evolving that person’s credibility as an independent investigator–absolutely critical for the trainee successfully competing for an academic job. This obligation can occasionally be viewed by the mentor as in conflict with hers or his own self interests as a scientist. When this conflict intersects with the inherent power relationship between mentor and trainee, it can result in serious trouble.

My only advice here is for trainees to be exceedingly careful in choosing their mentors. Once the “trouble stage” has been reached, things rarely turn out optimally. In the next post, some simple rules of thumb for choosing a mentor.

Jim

It was nice to fly into Dulles late yesterday afternoon over the green piedmont of Northern Virginia. The day before I had a great meeting at Caltech’s Broad Cafe with Andy Cameron of The Biological Bulletin’s editorial board who is working on the Sea Urchin Genome Project–nearly finished. The Sea Urchin is a remarkable model system, not only for developmental biology but also for those of us looking a protein kinase C- (PKC) mediated signal transcription in a simple system. What’s also interesting about the Urchin is that gene super-families often are reduced to a single member (PKC is an example of this). So we’re really looking forward to this annotated data when it comes out, probably over the summer.

Mid-week, I’m off to Scotland, for a few days of vacation.

Jim