Saturday, October 16, 2004

Wealthy New Lab Aims to Capture Dreams, Literally

By Maggie Fox
Reuters Health and Science Correspondent

Gerald Rubin is looking for someone who can take a picture of a thought.

To do it, he and colleagues are harnessing the powerful force of cold, hard cash -- Howard Hughes' cash, to be exact.

They are building a new $400 million laboratory in the green countryside outside Washington, D.C., and hope to attract the brightest and most unconventional minds in science to find a way to look into a person's brain and see what it is doing.

And they want to take their time doing it. "In a 100-year timeframe we want to understand human consciousness," said Rubin.

Rubin and colleagues at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute -- one of the world's richest philanthropies with an endowment worth $11.3 billion -- are approaching this ticklish problem backwards. They have bought a 280-acre farm in Ashburn, Virginia, and are building a new kind of research campus.

Only now, halfway through its construction, are they settling on what kind of research they want to do and looking for the people to do it.

"We are (like) a biotechnology company whose product is new knowledge and which has infinitely patient investors," Rubin told reporters on a recent tour, comparing the foundation to a corporation.

How did they settle on imaging thought?

"We wanted to pick an important biomedical problem but we wanted to pick a problem that wasn't easily addressed at academic campuses."

One area that might meet these criteria was the question of how brain cells store and process information.

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