Science

European molecular biology lab gets under way Funded by 10 countries,

$7 million Heidelberg

facility will be focal

point for global research,

meetings, and training

In the hills overlooking the picturesque West German university town of Heidelberg, an intensive building pro­gram is just getting under way. In coming months, the outline of the Eu­ropean Molecular Biology Laboratory will take shape, carved out of virgin forest. If all goes according to plan, completion is set for 1977.

The lab has been a long time in coming about. In fact, its creation has been uppermost in the mind of its di­rector general, Nobel Laureate Sir John Kendrew, since he and a group of prominent fellow molecular biologists decided to set up the European Molecu­lar Biology Organization 12 years ago.

Governments of 10 countries—Aus­tria, Denmark, France, West Germany, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.—are collab­orating in funding the $7 million facili­ty and contributing toward its annual budget of some $5.5 million. When fully operating, it will be an important focal point for international research in molecular biology as well as a location for conducting conferences, summer courses, and training programs.

In many respects the organization and running of the lab will follow closely the pattern of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. For example, the amount that each member country contributes toward the lab's annual budget is di­rectly keyed to its gross national prod­uct. In the early days of planning the facility, Sir John and his associates met frequently with Dr. Victor Weis-kopf, CERN's director general at the time before he moved back to Massa­chusetts Institute of Technology. They were influenced greatly by his advice.

The lab will be equipped to carry out fundamental research on various as­pects of cell biology. But another im­portant thrust of its activities will be directed toward developing novel, so­phisticated instrumentation to aid mo­lecular biologists in their work.

"We plan to be nearly half instru­mentation, which is a quite unusual balance," Sir John comments. For ex­

ample, a major instrumentation devel­opment will center on the use of scan­ning transmission of electron microsco­py for studying chromosomes, cell membranes, and the like.

In addition to the Heidelberg cam­pus, the facility has two satellite labo­ratories. One is at Hamburg's Deutsch-es Elektronen-Synchroton (DESY) fa­cility. The other is at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, site of a high-flux neutron source some­what similar to that at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Equipment will be available at Hamburg and Grenoble to permit bio­chemists to prepare their samples, many of which are extremely labile, just prior to scattering analysis.

The DESY machine, by causing electrons to travel in circles, generates x-ray beams that are much more in­tense than are those available from other sources.

"This is particularly interesting for molecular biologists," Sir John points out, "because one of the main methods of establishing structures of biological specimens is by x-ray diffraction. The pictures we are taking now at DESY are at least an order of magnitude quicker than can be obtained from an ordinary x-ray source. Eventually, we hope to get down to the millisecond range of exposure time. If this can be achieved, it will mean that we will be able to study a muscle fiber in motion, something that can't be done now.

"For this development, a great deal of instrumentation will be needed," Sir John explains. "The techniques are quite unconventional. Everything has to be done by remote control because radiation levels are so high. We will have to design all the equipment from nothing." The neutron diffraction studies at Grenoble will complement the x-ray work.

The Heidelberg complex eventually

Sir John: nearly half instrumentation

will have a full-time scientific staff of about 60. The few already recruited are working in space provided by the neighboring Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics and the German Can­cer Research Institute, and by Heidel­berg University. Since the lab is being paid for by the 10 governments, a large proportion of the staff will be recruited from those countries. But nationals of nonmember states also will be invited to join.

By next year, scientists from Austra­lia, Finland, and the U.S. will be among the full-time staff members. In January, Dr. Donald Caspar of Bran-deis University begins a three-year term on the lab's scientific advisory committee.

The Heidelberg lab, as well as those in Grenoble and Hamburg, will under­take its own basic research projects. "You can't provide a decent service to others unless you have a pretty strong in-house research program of your own," Sir John reasons.

Already, several lines of research are emerging at the Heidelberg lab. There are projects centering on the structure and function of muscle and the deter­mination of complex biological struc­tures, such as those of cell membranes and viruses.

"We don't want to repeat what is being done by everyone else," Sir John observes. "My own field of research, for example, has been the determination of protein structures. We aren't going into that because so many are doing it nowadays. Similarly on the cell biology side, most work currently is based on Escherichia coli and the bacteriopha­ges which interact with it. We tend to keep off E. coli and to think more about animal cells.

The overriding philosophy at the lab will be to do things which national lab­oratories either can't do or find diffi­cult to do, Sir John adds. "We are not competing with the national labs. Rather, we are trying to provide a ser­vice."

The possibility of embarking on re­search in genetic engineering will come up for discussion next month. "Some of our smaller member countries don't have facilities for this type of work and have asked whether we might provide them in Heidelberg," Sir John notes. "If we do, they would be there mainly for visitors to come and work. And we would certainly have on our staff an expert in the safety aspects of such ex­periments."

DermotA. 0'Sullivan, C&ENLondon

18 C&EN Oct. 20, 1975