Sir Paul's vision
Sir paul nurse boasts a long list of academic accolades
, among them a Nobel Prize, but his chummy manner and oodles of scientific star power have earned him the nickname "David Beckham of science". Given his penchant for fast motorbikes (he owns a Kawasaki), Valentino Rossi may have been more apt. Either way, the bike is doubtless efficient for Sir Paul, a busy man with no time for traffic jams. Recently elected as the next president of the Royal Society, Britain's most venerable scientific institution, he shuttles between London and New York's Rockefeller University, of which he is currently president, all the while continuing to run his own research lab. If that were not enough, next year Sir Paul will become the first director and chief executive of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation (UKCMRI). Last week your correspondent spoke to Sir Paul about his plan for the centre: to create one of the world's preeminent biomedical research centres.
A joint effort by the government-run Medical Research Council (MRC) and three private institutions (Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and University College London), UKCMRI will occupy premises next to London's St Pancras International train station. Construction of the swanky 600 million ($920 million) complex will begin early next year and, if all goes to plan, finish in late 2014.
The previous Labour government pledged to cover half of the capital expenditure. David Cameron's coalition cabinet has reaffirmed this pledge, conditional on being presented with "a satisfactory business case" before the end of the year. When I asked him whether he feared faltering government commitment in the era of austerity, his response was typically candid: "I'd be stupid if I said I don't have concerns." He immediately added that he has no doubts the case is compelling.
First, the public money will be supplemented by funds from the other founding partners, who will also cover most of the operational costs once the centre is up and running. Second, Sir Paul believes, other research and industrial facilities will coalesce around UKCMRI, creating a biomedical cluster to rival similar ventures in other parts of the world.
The new institution is billed as an entirely fresh look at biomedical research. Its core aim is "to understand how living things work" and to use this understanding to further clinical outcomes. This is to be facilitated by forging strong interdisciplinary links with university faculties specialised in biology and chemistry, but also physics, maths, engineering and computing; as well as by making the centre "permeable" to for-profit organisations, by enabling free exchange of ideas with industry.
As competition for talent goes, he is unfazed by rivals like Singapore's A*Star programme (its $2b cash pile, Zaha Hadid-designed Biopolis and lax bioethical regulations notwithstanding). "Britain does science very well," he avers, and its rational regulatory regime has much to be said for it. He plans to focus on youth: two thirds of the 1,500-odd staff are to be in their 30s and early 40s, a period when researchers tend to be at their most creative, but also at their most vulnerable. UKCMRI will provide them with generous financial support for up to two six-year stints. Unlike many other outfits, where money is ploughed into promising research, here it will follow promising researchers, giving them a free hand to "self-assemble and rearrange" into research teams, in a process akin to Google's creative culture. Indeed, the St Pancras complex has been designed precisely with such intermingling in mind.
The bottom-up innovation strategies that emerge as a result will of course be complemented with some degree of light-touch control. One element of this will no doubt be the top-down recruitment process. Sir Paul dismisses the comparison with governments' picking of industrial winners, assuring that the outcome will depend solely on researchers' individual merit.
It remains to be seen whether all these perky assumptions are borne out. If so, UKCMRI could herald a whole new model of biomedical innovation. In this respect, Sir Paul's institutional experiment is probably no less important than the scientific work to be conducted within it. (Visit www.thefakewatch.com and see the latest and most popular
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Sir Paul's vision
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