As the Guardian writes, Paul Nurse's plans for the Francis Crick Institute are as sweeping as the building's architecture — the building has been dubbed by some as Sir Paul's Cathedral, the paper notes.
Nurse, the former president of the Royal Society and Nobel laureate, envisions the Crick Institute as a place where researchers can focus on riskier long-term projects. Researchers there will have greater freedom from chasing down grants, as each lab will receive some core funding, and decreased pressure to publish.
Rather than grouping the labs into departments, Nurse says there will be interest groups that researchers can affiliate with as their work takes them in various directions. Researchers with different interests have been assigned offices in labs in a way that Nurse says will lead to "gentle anarchy." At the same time, the institute will partner with pharmaceutical companies to tap their expertise as well.
"All I have done is stolen best practice as I see it from around the world," Nurse tells the Guardian.
Whether it will be able to deliver on these plans remains to be seen, the paper notes. "To an extent I think it is marvelous putting everyone together. There should be massive synergy from having such a lot of different expertise, people with different skills, different thoughts, different backgrounds, it should be fantastic," the University of York's Jenny Southgate says. "But you can't force people to work together, and just putting them in the same room doesn't mean that is going to happen."