CHEVY CHASE, Md.--Gerald Rubin, leader of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Genetics at University of California, Berkeley, has been appointed vice-president for biomedical research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Thomas Cech, president-designate of the institute, said that along with running national competitions for the selection of new Hughes investigators, Rubin will determine how the institute can best support progress in bioinformatics and computational biology.