Geneticist Gerald Rubin sat in the nondescript conference room of a leftover building that once belonged to a now-defunct software company and talked like a scientist possessed by a vision.
“This is the mythical ivory tower,” he said, referring not to his surroundings but to architectural drawings of a mammoth, $320 million laboratory building that is under construction a hundred yards away. “We’ll have good coffee, and you just have to do science, nothing else. And that is the empowering thing—or frightening thing. We’ll eliminate all of the excuses for not doing science.”
Rubin, vice president of biomedical research for the nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is, with a few notable colleagues and about $500 million in HHMI money, trying to create a biology-focused version of Bell Laboratories in its heyday. The new HHMI facility, called the Janelia Farm Research Campus after the historic farmhouse that still sits on the...
