Howard Hughes Still Rocking

According to a recent news item, Howard Hughes Medical Institute has picked 56 of the nations top biomedical research scientists, 42 men, and 14 women, and told them to tackle their most daunting, daring challenges.

HHMI has pledged to support these pioneers, to the tune of 600 million dollars.

This is a high-risk/high-reward scenario, to be sure, but the potential it represents for bold advances in medicine cannot be understated.

"This crop of HHMI investigators is at the forefront of a wide range of scientific fields — ranging from microbiology, genetics, and immunology to fields of inquiry that are newer to HHMI, such as bioengineering, synthetic biology, and the ecology of infectious disease. Some of the scientific questions driving the new investigators' research include: How does aging contribute to neurodegeneration? Which genetic changes alter behavior throughout evolution? What can bacteria teach chemists about designing better antibiotics? And does climate change affect the spread of infectious diseases?"

Encouraging news.
Special thanks to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for the generous and forward-thinking act.

Here's the original press release to parse at your leisure: HHMI News

Howard Hughes was a fascinating cat. If you don't know much about him, we recommend "Citizen Hughes" by Michael Drosnin as a primer. Also, "Howard Hughes: the Untold Story" by Peter Harry Brown was pretty good too! (Cripes, I've read a lot of Howard Hughes biographies.)

Here's the Howard Hughes wiki.