Three UK science leaders introduce a new institution and approach for medical research

The UK’s Francis Crick Institute , now evolving based on several institutions, intends to follow ‘a distinctive vision of how medical research should be conducted.’ In the Science magazine commentary ‘Building better institutions ,’ three of its leaders foresee a strongly interdisciplinary environment where laboratory biologists collaborate with clinical researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and physical scientists ‘to expand their thinking and repertoire of experimental approaches.’

The coauthors—Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, and his Francis Crick Institute colleagues Richard Treisman and Jim Smith—never mention obvious resonances with the scientific and technical culture of the storied Bell Labs. But they plan to ‘juxtapose groups with different interests and encourage their mixing.’ Instead of traditional departments, ‘investigators will self-organize into interest groups focused around research questions or technical approaches.’ These investigators ‘need to be encouraged to identify important questions and tackle them’ in multidisciplinary ways, because biomedical research must mix biological, nonbiological, and clinical disciplines as well as hospital and commercial partners.

The authors emphasize the importance of relatively youthful researchers, who will find ‘a supportive research environment, secure research funding, and time to make important discoveries.’ They close, in fact, by quoting Crick himself, who observed that ‘by the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise.’ They declare it ‘fitting that Crick’s eponymous institute aims to develop a culture that escapes this constraint.’

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.