The Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) is officially opening on 25/26th October 2006. The centre has been about a decade in the making, and aims to be a world-class research centre, with around £37 million (~$70 million) of initial funding from the Wellcome Trust charity, UK Research Councils and others. If you're looking for a bioinformatics job, PhD, PostDoc etc in the UK, MIB is continuously hiring and looks like a good place to work, if the opening programme (which follows) is anything to go by.
Unfortunately the MIB web pages aren't quite world class yet, the promotional launch material is only available in pdf format, *sigh*, see references below. So I'm blogging the MIB Symposium launch programme here to put the stuff online. Talks scheduled for the second day of the opening, 26th October 2006, are listed below, and these can be attended by free registration (see references):
Session 1: Bio-molecular machines, 9.00-11.00
Session chaired by Alan North, Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences
- John E. Walker (MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit, Cambridge, UK): Biomolecular rotary motors.
- Yoshi Nakamura (Tokyo University, Japan): Aptamer as RNA-made super antibody for basic and therapeutic applications
- John McCarthy, (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre): Molecular mechanisms underlying post-transcrptional gene expression.
- Refreshment break
Session 2: Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, 11.00-12.40
Session chaired by Bob Ford, Professor of Structural Biology, Faculty of Life Sciences.
- Alan Fersht (MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, Cambridge, UK): Structure and Stability of the Tumour Suppressor p53.
- Gerhard Wagner (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA): NMR studies of protein interactions regulating gene expression.
- Stefan Weber (Freie Universität Berlin): Aspects and Prospects of Modern Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectroscopy.
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Lunch
Session 3: Systems and Information, 13.35-15.45
Session chaired by John Perkins, Dean of Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
- Greg Stephanopoulos (MIT, Cambridge MA, USA): Promise and challenges of systems biology in advancing biotechnology and biomedical research.
- Douglas Kell, (MIB and School of Chemistry, University of Manchester): Systems Biology - why and how.
- Jean Beggs (Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, The Univeristy of Edinburgh, UK): Messenger RNA processing - a complex system.
- Jun'ichi Tsujii (MIB and School of Computer Science, University of Manchester): Linking text with knowledge - challenges for Text Mining in Biology.
Session 4: Biocatalysis, 16.10-17.00
Session chaired by Hans Westerhoff, Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre
- Nigel Scrutton (MIB and Faculty of Life Sciences): 'Squeezing' barriers - a dynamical view of enzyme catalysis.
- Gill Stephens, (MIB and School of Chemical Engineering): Redox biocatalysis - the next generation of enzymes for manufacturing pharmaceutical intermediates and specialty chemicals.
Session 5: Bionanoscience and engineering: 17.00-18.00
Session chaired by Peter Fielden, Chemical Engineering
- Joseph Wang (Arizona State University, USA): Nanomaterials for monitoring and controlling biomolecular interactions.
- Milan Stojanovich (Columbia University Medical School, New York, USA): Deoxyribozyme-based devices.
Session 6: Postgenomic Analytical Technologies, 18.00-19.10
Session chaired by Roy Goodacre, MIB and School of Chemistry
- Ruedi Aebersold (ETH Zürich): Quantitative Proteomics and Systems Biology
- Simon Gaskell, MIB and School of Chemistry: New analytical science in proteomics and metabolomics.
- Concluding remarks.
References
- Hannah Hoag (2004) All systems go: Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre Nature. 427 (6974), 568-9. DOI:10.1038/nj6974-568a
- John McCarthy (2004) Tackling the challenges of interdisciplinary bioscience. Nature Reviews Molecular cell biology. 5 (11), 933-7. DOI:10.1038/nrm1501
- More publications about Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB) tagged in Connotea
- Manchester Biocentre launch programme 25th October 2006 (pdf)
- Manchester Biocentre launch programme 26th October 2006 (pdf)
Comments
Reading this post reminded
Reading this post reminded me of a recent Paul Graham essay: How to Be Silicon Valley. While Manchester is renowned for having one of the world's best football teams it is not known for being a mecca of bioinformatics. I'm sure there are some excellent groups there, however the question is *can* it be a world class research center ? I am facing a similar problem at the moment. How to create an environment that will attract the right people to do world class bioinformatics ?
Mr. Graham, who we should note is a world class pontificator, suggests that there are two ingredients: "I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds."
Taiwan has its fair share of rich people and nerds (who do you think makes all those iPods), but it doesn't seem to have helped produce a rich source of bioinformatics wannabees...
Mr. Graham goes on at some length elaborating on these points, but one thing I did not see in his diatribe was the risk taking element. To move to Manchester or work for a company that does not yet have an industry sell to, you have to take a fairly large risk. This risk impacts apon your financial future, lifestyle and many other aspects of your life.
So my question is does Manchester have what it takes ? Are people willing to take the risk ? Neil may have something to say on this, IMB is also in the business of creating a 'world class research center'.
And Steve I know you're reading, so please, let us know your thoughts on this one :)
Exciting initiative
This looks great and I hope the centre succeeds. It's certainly an impressive speaker list for the inauguration - even I know or know of at least a half-dozen of those names.
As for how to create a "world-class" centre - good people and money! OK, it's a bit more complex than that. I think the IMB has succeeded because (1) they've identified important biological problems, more often than not with a biomedical angle and (2) they have excellent integration and collaboration between large-scale wet lab experiments (transcriptomics, imaging, screens of various sorts) and the computational people. It's not just a case of taking pre-existing groups, adding computer nerds and throwing them together in a building (though admittedly IMB did kind of start out that way).
Success? Wait and see...
I think the primary motivation of MIB is scientific success before commercial success. Only time will tell how successful they are, and if MIB can be a truly world-class research centre. The comments on this post by Greg and Neil reminded me of an article by Gerald Rubin from Berkeley in Cell describing an an ongoing experiment in the social engineering of scientific research communities at Janelia Farm. Their experiment is trying to recreate the success of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB) in Cambridge, England and AT&T's Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Like Paul Grahams How to Be Silly Valley, the article proposes a set of social requirements for doing world-leading groundbreaking scientific research. Speaking of which, A Beginner's guide to winning the Nobel Prize by Peter Doherty looks like it might be a good read as well.