 |
PAGE 1 OF 2
Take some of the “newest” additions to the scientific lexicon. Writing in The Scientist some years ago, the late Joshua Lederberg and linguist Alexa T. McCray sought the origins of -ome and -omics, suffixes of choice in contemporary biology. The term “genomics” may have arisen in the 1970s, but Lederberg and McCray turned to Sanskrit and Greek to understand the holistic meaning of -ome, noting that the Sanskrit syllable Om “encompasses the entire universe in its unlimitedness” and that the Greek letter omega is “the greatest and very last character” of the alphabet, the symbolic last word.
So it is with some trepidation that this issue of the HHMI Bulletin introduces a graphical “interactome” that illustrates the interconnected research interests of the 56 scientists recently selected as new HHMI investigators (See Add 56). This competition—our first major experiment allowing scientists to apply directly to the Institute—has already introduced new variables into the HHMI community. We received 1,070 applications, and while sifting through so many documents certainly required more work than in the previous nomination-based competitions, we achieved our goal of choosing investigators from a wider, deeper pool of candidates. Seven institutions will be represented by an investigator for the first time, and we are expanding into intriguing areas of research, including bioengineering, synthetic biology, and the ecology of infectious disease.
As an organization, we frequently describe our approach to supporting science as “people not projects”—that is, we identify highly creative researchers working across the spectrum of biomedically related projects and provide them with resources that will enable them to make discoveries for the long-term betterment of human health. We also work to ensure that participation in the HHMI community of scientists will generate new connections and ideas. In fact, it would be a fascinating exercise to remap the “Class of 2008” in five or 10 years—along with the existing investigators, the lab heads at the Janelia Farm Research Campus, and our International Research Scholars—to view the collaborative networks that emerge as well as the ways these interactions modify the questions these scientists seek to answer.
The HHMI community also overlaps with other networks of researchers in this country and around the world—what you might describe as a human interactome seeking to unravel the mysteries of the biological interactome. It goes without saying that the map of science itself is both complex and dynamic.
Photo: Bruce Weller
|
|
|
