One evening in 1999, Thomas R. Cech, who was soon to be president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, sat at a table in a hotel restaurant in Boulder, Colo., with two other Hughes scientists. One of them he would soon lure from the University of California at Berkeley to run the research operation the men were sketching on the back of a napkin. Today a version of that sketch is under construction in Loudoun County, about 35 miles southwest of Washington. A departure from the way medical-research institutes usually work, the Janelia Farm Research Campus will bring 300 scientists together to share ideas rather than work isolated in university laboratories around the nation, the more typical arrangement.
