She listened to their advice but stayed the course. In a 2007 article in Nature, Chen and colleagues published their complete solution of the maltose ABC transporter. Looking back, Chen says that it wasn't obstinacy or the chance of having a high-profile publication that motivated her. “I was doing this because I was just so interested in the molecule,” she recalls. “I told people that I was obsessed. I just had to see it.” Solving the maltose transporter puts Chen's lab at the leading edge of the ABC transporter field.

Carlos Brody risked his scientific reputation, and possibly his dignity. Brody was a computational neuroscientist at Princeton University, adept at extracting patterns and building mathematical models based on raw data from laboratory experiments. His problem was how individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex flip from short-term memory storage to instant decision making. Brody began building a mathematical model of neural firing patterns based on data from monkeys that had been laboriously taught a memory-versus-decision game. To test his model, Brody needed more data, but the cost and effort of caring for and training monkeys was prohibitive. So he shifted gears and set up his own rat lab. It involved all the paraphernalia of animal work—cages, care guidelines, and neural wiring harness equipment—the kind of bulky equipment that makes most computational scientists grateful for having their lab in a laptop.

		With this latest round of investigator appointments, HHMI broadened its talent search. For the first time, HHMI allowed faculty with 4 to 10 years experience at more than 200 American research institutions to apply directly rather than wait to be nominated by their institutions. The open process produced a field of 1,076 applicants from which the 56 new investigators were chosen. Seven are from institutions that never had an HHMI investigator before:­­ the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Boston University, Cornell University-Ithaca, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and the University of Texas at Austin. The new investigators—among them, individuals who got their start in Argentina, Italy, Belgium, China, Israel, and the Netherlands—are also branching out into areas that are newer to HHMI, including bioengineering, synthetic biology, and the ecology of infectious diseases.

But Brody wanted lots of data from lots of properly trained rats. He designed a computer-run rat academy that could teach 20 animals at a time how to remember two differently pitched tones and then decide which way to turn for a reward that came with the higher-pitched correct answer. With his HHMI investigator status in hand, Brody will finally test his mathematical model against neuronal patterning data collected from his educated rats. Even Brody seems a little startled by his hands-on daring. “In retrospect, it was totally crazy but it seems to be working out,” he allows.

Risk is integral to the HHMI investigator program, which has always pursued a strategy of funding “people, not projects.” HHMI investigators are given the freedom and flexibility to follow their ideas where they lead to make “fundamental discoveries of lasting scientific value and benefit to humanity.”

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