Wealthy new lab aims to capture dreams, literally

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.

Rubin and the other founders of Janelia Farm - HHMI President Thomas Cech and chief scientific officer David Clayton - polled scientists on what they thought the biggest problem in future biomedical research would be.

"They all say imaging," Rubin said. As with all "basic" scientific research, the researchers do not know what they might discover or its potential applications.

While biologists have a rough idea of what goes on in a cell, current scans all record the action indirectly, by measuring glucose uptake, for instance.

CAPTURING DREAMS

What if you could take a picture of a brain cell at the very moment it recorded a thought?

Trying to do this will require the expertise of neurobiologists, physicists, molecular biologists, chemists, geneticists, instrument designers and computer scientists.

Those who are interested will hear a beguiling call: "We'll give you money, lots of money, and we won't ask too many questions," Rubin said.

Hughes, who founded the Hughes Aircraft Company and helped turn TWA in a major airline, founded HHMI in 1953. Hughes Aircraft went to the Institute after his death in 1976.

Rubin said the HHMI board of trustees want to act like venture capitalists.