Culture and Environment

The planning and development of the Janelia Farm Research Campus offered an opportunity to define and create an environment to foster basic biomedical research in a manner complementary to and synergistic with HHMI's previously existing programs and those of its host institutions. Although there were numerous organizational "cultures" in which scientific research is conducted, from HHMI's perspective, no single culture has emerged as "the best." Despite their variety, two factors had the largest influence in shaping the organizational cultures of research laboratories: the career structures available to the participants and the conditions attached to the research funding.

"My questions are not as absurd as they seem, because creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized. It arises spontaneously from individual talent."

-- Max Perutz, from Preface to I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier

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THE JANELIA FARM ALTERNATIVE

Janelia Farm addresses the issues HHMI views as limiting scientific progress in other settings, using at least three of our strengths:

• The ability to move quickly and flexibly without academic bureaucracy or strict adherence to academic career structures.
  
  
• Substantial financial resources, which eliminate the restrictions imposed by the need to appeal to a grant review panel or to generate a profit.
  
  
• The intellectual resources inherent in HHMI's 300+ investigators and Janelia lab heads, as well as the more than 100 HHMI international research scholars, who are some of the most innovative biomedical researchers in the world.

Janelia Farm provides a unique, complementary environment to pursue activities and support careers not well served by those institutions and funding mechanisms.

RESEARCH FUNDING

Having HHMI provide all the funding for activities at Janelia Farm is absolutely essential for creating the interactive, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research environment that is part of the vision. Only in this way can we provide scientists with the freedom from distractions that will allow them to participate directly in experimental work and the freedom to tackle important problems that might be unsuitable for a typical grant application, either because a clear path to successful conclusion cannot be fully articulated, because they are infrastructural, or because they require too long-term an investment.

For these reasons, HHMI self-funds all ongoing research activities at Janelia Farm and neither seeks nor accepts outside grant funding. Because Janelia Farm researchers have small groups, their work can be supported for the same amount per investigator as we provide the host-institution-based investigators; these investigators generally have much larger groups, which are co-supported by federal grant funds.