Ashburn, Virginia

Designers overlooked one small flaw when they drew up plans for Janelia Farm, the new $500-million facility for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. Deer, unaware of their new neighbour built into the side of a hill, started leaping over the structure to their deaths. The deer soon wised up. But Janelia's élite group of investigators may hope they aren't taking a comparable leap into the unknown by joining this unusual laboratory.

Janelia Farm, which welcomed its first few investigators in August, trumpets itself as a rare institutional model for innovative biomedical research. The lure, including smart labs, has drawn 16 leading scientists so far, most in neurobiology and image processing, with 44 expected by 2009. Many surrendered the comforts of tenure for this cutting-edge facility, which pushes scientists to think big and take chances on interdisciplinary collaborations.

The deal is: you bet your career, and I bet $10 million.

But there are risks. Investigators will be reviewed after six years initially, and subsequently every five years. If a panel of outside experts finds the research to be too conventional or progress insufficient, the investigator will be kicked out — albeit with two years of additional funding to soften the blow. “The deal is: you bet your career,” says director Gerry Rubin, “and I bet $10 million.”

Those who have come to Janelia are an idiosyncratic bunch. They include Gene Myers, a shotgun gene-sequencing pioneer who gave up tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, to come. Eric Betzig started as a physicist at New Jersey's famed Bell Laboratories before working at his family's machine-tool business for eight years. Sean Eddy, a computational biologist, arrived from a tenured genetics position at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

By any metric, Janelia is an impressive lab space. The building is carved into a hill about 60 kilometres west of Washington DC, with each floor in the large, multi-level terrace being at ground level. Labs are walled in with thick glass from floor to ceiling, and a modular design allows them to be easily reconfigured to suit an investigator's needs. The campus also boasts a gym, 50 apartments and a daycare facility. There's also a pub, complete with free coffee to entice people together and a whiteboard for spontaneous brainstorms.

It's all part of a social-engineering project, painstakingly designed to stimulate social interactions and spark informal research discussions. Rubin, a Drosophila geneticist who is moving his lab to Janelia from the University of California, Berkeley, based Janelia loosely on the open laboratories of Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.

Space to think: the Janelia Farm lab aims to encourage unconventional work. Credit: P. FETTERS

Groups are no bigger than six members, to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration that relies on field experts rather than graduate students or postdocs. This should also ensure that group leaders are active bench scientists rather than just managers, says Rubin. The glass walls help too, by letting researchers see who's in and what they're doing.

At Bio-X, a similar suite of glass-walled labs at Stanford University in California, few have complained about the lack of privacy, says its operations director Heideh Fattaey. But some have set up whiteboards to block off space. “You can't change human nature,” she says. In-house architect Bob McGhee, who helped to design the labs at Janelia, acknowledges that they are not suitable for researchers conducting, for example, ethically sensitive animal studies.

Rubin insists that he doesn't want to replicate other institutes, no matter how successful or prestigious they may be. “My greatest failure would be if this turns into another Salk or Whitehead,” he says.

Interdisciplinary labs may be trendy, but placing physicists next to biologists doesn't necessarily spark a revolution. “There's not as much real collaboration as one would think,” says Janelia group leader Loren Looger, a protein-engineering researcher with a background in maths and chemistry, who has also worked at Bio-X. But Janelia should prove more successful, he says, as group leaders, already proficient in multiple disciplines, will not have to worry about defending unconventional research to secure tenure — sometimes a problem in academia.

“It may fail,” says Looger. Nevertheless, he revels in being part of the Janelia experiment.