1338 NATURE MEDICINE • VOLUME 5 • NUMBER 12 • DECEMBER 1999

NEWS

Poor attendance bankrupts conferenceBiomedical researchers keen to commer-cialize their discoveries were left strandedlast month when the APEC Technomart IIIconference and trade fair in Australiaclosed shop after only two of its scheduledsix days. APEC economies, including theUS, The People’s Republic of China,Chinese Taipei, Russia, Japan, New Zealandand Indonesia, were expected to generate30,000 visits to 11 conference venues, butfewer than 3,000 people turned up, send-ing the operating company, PacRimTechnomart, into liquidation.

On day one, the director of Melbourne’sBaker Medical Research Institute, JohnFunder, told visitors that the Australiangovernment was “scientifically and tech-nologically illiterate” in failing to movefast enough to cash in on the biotech rev-olution. By day two, exhibitors, who hadpaid up to AUS$30,000 (US$19,000) fortheir displays, were inclined to agree, andsome speakers were addressing audiencesof fewer than ten people. On day three,some of Australia’s well-known biomed-ical researchers—including Mark vonItzstein, whose work led to the develop-ment of the influenza drug zanamivir,and Ian Gust, director of R&D for vaccinemanufacturer CSL—were flying in to

Cross-disciplinary biomedical research atStanford University will benefit from a$150 million gift by Jim Clark, a formerengineering professor at the universitywho went on to start Netscape, SiliconGraphics and other companies. With 50faculty, 400 students and a 20,700-m2

building, the new Clark Center will be amid-range privately funded biomedicalresearch institute, equal in size to SanDiego’s Salk Institute and somewhatlarger than the Whitehead Institute at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.

The center aims to foster collaborationsbetween basic, applied and clinicalsciences. Stanford has taken a lead on this with its Institute of BiomedicalEngineering, which merges traditionallyseparate disciplines such as engineeringand radiology to approach tasks like sim-ulating the physiology of a knee joint, orcalculating blood flow patterns to showhow the vasculature is affected by shunts.

The center’s programs are all based onthe premise that it is no longer possible tothink about biomedicine without compu-tation. As industry continues to drain offtalent from academia faster than it can bereplaced, “we’d like to double the num-ber of people at Stanford who want tomake biocomputation a key part of theirwork,” says Russ Altman, who directs aStanford informatics program.

The largest part of the center, “Bio-X,”will be a more diffuse—hence the variableembedded in its name—aggregation ofdisciplines, according to its biochemist di-rector, Jim Spudich. ‘Neuroinformatics’,for example, with its heavy imaging com-ponent, requires talent from medicine,cognitive psychology, molecular biology,physics and computer science.

Unlike Harvard or Berkeley, Stanfordhas no Charles River or San FranciscoBay separating its main campus from itsmedical school, but Campus Drive, amain thoroughfare that bisects thecampus, has historically separatedmedicine from academic departments.The Clark building will bridgeStanford’s ‘moat’ both physically andintellectually. “It makes enormoussense to have this building as a unifier,”says Mike Levitt, chair of StructuralBiology. “Clark’s initial investment of$150 million will produce value in thebillions,” he predicts.

Potter Wickware, San Francisco

Queensland’s Gold Coast to deliver theirpapers just as exhibitors were pullingdown their stalls.

“I’ve never heard of this happening be-fore,” Peter Timms, director of DNA re-search at the Queenland University ofTechnology center for diagnostic tech-nologies, told Nature Medicine. “It’s a verycompetitive world and this was an impor-tant thing for us to get right…I hope that ithasn’t done a huge amount of damage [toAustralian research].”

Last year’s Technomart, held in ChineseTaipei, generated deals worth a total ofAUS$275 million in medicine, defence,agriculture and information technology.Some observers blamed the 1999 collapseon the failure of the private sector opera-tors to deliver an affordable event, evenpropped up by AUS$500,000 in govern-ment funds.

For biotech-promoting politicians likeQueensland Premier Peter Beattie, whohad personally invited delegates duringtrade missions to Asia and North America,the collapse was a disaster, moving him toplead “let’s not let this one incident cast acloud over the excellent reputation andwork” being done in Australia.

Rada Rouse, Brisbane

Stanford donation fundstransdisciplinary center

More than a decade after a US NationalAcademy of Sciences report to the USCongress called for 10 new research cen-ters devoted to aging research, the firstand only such center tohave come out of theproposal has opened inNovato, California.

The Buck Center, anindependent researchinstitute that received$5.5 million from theLeonard and Beryl Buck Trust in 1999, isexpected house up to 50 laboratorieswithin the next five-ten years. The cen-ter’s president and CEO, Dale E. Bredesen,is recruiting staff to studyneurodegenerative diseases associatedwith the aging process. “Our initial re-search focus will be to find early markersfor diseases such as Alzheimer’s Diseaseand Parkinson’s, based on proteoge-nomics,” says Bredesen.

According to Huber Warner of theNational Institute of Aging (NIA), whichspends $600 million annually on agingresearch, the Buck Center is the only in-

First independent aging research center opensdependent aging research center in theUS, although there are around two dozenuniversities that have departments de-voted specifically to the field.

“Unfortunately, untilaging research reachesthe level of prominenceof something like can-cer, it will be hard to getprivate funding forthese kinds of centers,”says Warner.

Using a new $6 million gift from theBrown Foundation, the University ofTexas Health Science Center at SanAntonio is also planning to build a free-standing Center for Longevity and AgingStudies. “Right now cancer research is thequeen of science. But as the average pop-ulation grows older...[aging research] iswhere the money and demand will be,”says Director of Aging Research ArlanRichardson. The number of senior citi-zens in the US is expected to double bythe year 2050, making up over 25% of thepopulation.

Kristine Novak, New York

The Buck Center

© 1999 Nature America Inc. • http://medicine.nature.com©

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