When I was offered a job at the ‘Nobel Prize factory’, as the Laboratory of Molecular Biology is known, I was warned that one could easily get lost in its labyrinthine corridors. Truth be told, I did get confused a couple of times during my first week… But I also quickly realised that once you knew your way around, the convoluted architecture offered an unexpected advantage: you kept bumping into people and inevitably making friends.
The LMB, as it’s usually referred to, has now moved into a beautiful, modern new building, but its friendly social atmosphere continues to be one of the ingredients for its success. In science, new ideas and collaborations often arise from informal discussions over lunch at the canteen, a conference coffee break, or a corridor chat. Max Perutz, one of the founding members of the LMB, once wrote:
Experience had taught me that laboratories often fail because their scientists never talk to each other.
To encourage the exchange of ideas between scientists, Perutz set up a bright, warm canteen on the top floor of the LMB managed by his wife Gisela, who made sure “the food was good and that it was a place where people would make friends.” Decades later, when I was a researcher there, the canteen’s delicious cheese scones and panoramic windows facing the lush English countryside remained very popular… Following Perutz’s tradition, the new LMB building also has a restaurant on the top floor with spectacular views (and cheese scones).
A success story
The LMB is a publicly funded biomedical research institute in the outskirts of Cambridge, UK, with an unusually high number of Nobel laureates. 16 researchers have been awarded 12 Nobel prizes since the institute was founded by Perutz and John Kendrew in 1947, initially as a Medical Research Council (MRC) unit at the Cavendish Laboratory. A few other research institutions can boast even more Nobel prizes, but many of their laureates were hired after receiving the award. The LMB is unique because its Nobel prizes were awarded for research conducted in-house, and this is why it’s been nicknamed the Nobel Prize factory.
Scientific breakthroughs by LMB researchers include not only the discovery of fundamental biological processes, but also the development of innovative methods that revolutionised biomedical research. For example, the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick (and Rosalind Franklin at King’s College London) in 1953 led to the birth of a new research field- molecular biology. And DNA sequencing, a method developed by Fred Sanger in 1977 to read the sequence of DNA ‘letters’ within a gene, is still one of the techniques most widely used in laboratories around the world.
One of the reasons the LMB has been at the forefront of biomedical research is its tradition to invest in so-called basic research. This is the type of science that has no immediate practical applications- its sole purpose is to explain how the world works. Basic research isn’t popular amongst funders and politicians because it’s risky, and can take a long time to produce visible results. Yet, as the LMB’s success clearly demonstrates, it’s this type of curiosity-driven research that leads to groundbreaking discoveries.
Protein structure and Cryo-EM
The study of protein structure is one of the key research areas of the LMB, and a few of its Nobel Prizes were awarded to discoveries in this field. In fact, the MRC unit that gave rise to the LMB was established to allow Perutz and Kendrew to determine the structure of proteins using X-ray crystallography. For this research they were jointly awarded a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1962, the year of the inauguration of the first LMB building.
Although X-ray crystallography is still used nowadays to study protein structure, over the past decade or so scientists have been switching method and many now use Cryo-EM instead. The type of data this new microscope-based technique produces represents such a huge leap in our understanding of protein structure that its developers were recently awarded a Nobel prize (in 2017). And you guessed it… one of them, Richard Henderson, is a researcher at the LMB.
But what is so special about this research institute? To find out, I visited the LMB to interview Lori Passmore, a leading expert in Cryo-EM and protein structure research. She showed me around the new building (I even got to see the Cryo-EM microscope!) and explained why the LMB is such a successful research institution. You can watch the interview in the video above (and please don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel!).
