PHILADELPHIA — Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen is giving $100 million over five years to fund cell science, Allan Jones, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Brain Science announced December 8 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology.
The new Allen Institute for Cell Science will employ about 75 scientists from a variety of disciplines and will be housed in the same building in Seattle as the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The aim of the institute is to understand how a cell’s machinery fits together and functions in health and disease.
The institute will create a library of human stem cell strains in which each strain will carry a different fluorescently tagged protein so that scientists will be able to monitor each protein’s actions.
“The cell is a dynamic spatial, temporal system and we need to understand that,” says cell biologist Rick Horwitz, currently at the University of Virginia, who will head the new institute.
