The top name is Tatyana Golovkina, PhD, a Russian-born staff scientist who's one of Jackson's 35 "investigators," or research team leaders. "Dr. Golovkina traced tumor resistance to a single gene in there," says Peterson, Jackson Lab's spokesperson.
Indeed, Golovkina found a mouse strain that's genetically resistant to certain types of cancer, and is studying, with the help of a $720,000 grant from the American Cancer Society, how the mouse's immune system could help fight cancer in humans.
Right across the hall is another lab. The list by the door features Shaoguang Li, PhD, a former oncologist in China who moved to the United States, gained a pair of doctoral degrees, and now works in Bar Harbor, on the forefront of leukemia research
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"This may be the most international spot in all of Maine," says Peterson. "And one of the smartest. I can't even imagine how many years of education are in those two rooms."
Everyone who drives from downtown Bar Harbor to Acadia National Park passes Jackson Lab. The campus seems dropped in an unlikely place, in the northeast corner of the country, on an island, hours from a metropolitan center. Passersby may see the lab as a mysterious presence, piquing their curiosity before their thoughts turn to Sand Beach or a park hiking trail.
Few understand the lab's impact. It's the largest employer in Hancock County and one of the state's top 20. The Jackson Laboratory campus, a mix of old and new state-of-the-art structures, draws the world's best and brightest, and provides good jobs, with good benefits, to a region that sorely needs them. At the center of the state's effort to build a biomedical industry, the lab holds vast importance to the economies of Mount Desert, the Bangor metro region, and the state. And, it pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant money.
"The lab's annual budget is about $140 million," says Chuck Hewett, PhD, the lab's chief operating officer. "The vast majority of that gets spent in Maine, and the vast majority of revenue comes from outside the state. It's a real win-win in that sense."
That doesn't even take into account the potential benefits of the lab's mission statement. With its lofty goal "to improve the quality of human life," Jackson Lab is even more important to the scientific world than it is to Maine.
"This is nothing short of a world-class facility, right in Bar Harbor," says lab director Richard Woychik, PhD.
As genetic science revolutionizes the way we study disease, the lab is riding the edge, developing the weapons mankind needs to treat or prevent cancer, birth defects, neurological and immune-system disorders, and other diseases, including two that have hit Maine hard: diabetes and obesity. But the mission is also fulfilled through JAX Research Systems, the mouse-breeding subsidiary that supplies much of the scientific world with its mice.
"People know we do a lot of work on mice here," says Barbara Knowles, PhD, vice president of training, education, and collaboration. "But these are model organisms. Our work is for people."
It all started in the early 1990s, when Clarence Cook Little theorized that mice could be a model for studying cancer and other diseases in humans. He bred brothers and sisters in order to create genetically uniform mice. The director of the lab from its 1929 inception, and the man who raised the funds to found it, was right.
In 2000, the journal Nature said that Little's inbred mice have led to at least 17 Nobel Prizes, and that "when diseases such as cancer and AIDS are eventually conquered, [inbred] mice ... will have played an important role in the battle."
Over its 76-year history, the lab has grown exponentially, never more impressively than it has over the past 10 years. With nearly 1,300 employees, Jackson is twice its 1997 size. It's now home to 750,000 living mice and millions of frozen embryos.
Why mice? They're economical, fast breeders, and they feature all the same organs and almost all of the same genes as humans. When the mouse genome was mapped, even geneticists were amazed at how close the two genetic systems are. And, over 20 generations, mice can be bred to pure, identical strains perfect for research.
Jackson scientists manipulate mouse genes, adding or subtracting genes from a population, and studying the effects. What goes wrong when a particular gene is removed tells the scientist what that particular gene does.
For example, Jackson scientists can "knock out" a particular gene from certain mice. The lack of the gene may cause, say, obesity. If they think, based on genetic studies, that the same gene is involved with obesity in humans, then treating the mice might lead to treatment methods for people, too.
"You can map out therapies, map out prevention strategies, and try to figure out how to address obesity, and apply for a clinical trial to see if it works on people," Dr. Knowles says. "Basically, we know something about a mouse's genetic structure, and wonder if it's true for humans. Or, we might know what a human gene does. We can make a mouse model of it, see if it's the same, and if it is, we can try to find ways to fix it."
In the past 15 years, Jackson scientists have identified genes that have helped, or may help, address cancers, osteoporosis, glaucoma and blindness, hearing disorders, heart disease, and high blood pressure, among others.
The facility also supplies scientists all over the world with mice and information. JAX Research Systems offers nearly 3,000 strains of mice. The top-selling 800 or so are kept in the lab's many mouse rooms, areas closed off to all but necessary personnel, in order to keep the mice safe from pathogens. The rest are kept in embryo form, frozen in tiny vials within large tanks of liquid nitrogen.
"If someone needs a rare mouse that hasn't been used in 20 years, we can produce them through in vitro fertilization," Peterson says. "This is like a repository for genetic gold."
The mouse genome database is housed at Jackson. It allows scientists to access the world's largest collection of information about lab-mice genetics via the Internet. Last year, the site had more than 6.5 million hits.
Education is also part of the lab's mission. Programs for K-12 students, high-school and undergraduate internships, a PhD program in functional genomics, and even postdoctoral training bring Mainers to the lab, and other students to Maine.
Jill Goldthwait is a registered nurse, a former state senator, and a member of Gov. John Baldacci's Creative Economy Council. Since 2003, she's worked part-time at Jackson, as director of government relations. As an outsider turned insider, she provides a unique perspective on the lab.
It is a place with unparalleled respect in the world of genetic science. Goldthwait remembers meeting with a leader from another part of the country who was studying Jackson Lab as a model for a mouse-breeding facility she was starting. Goldthwait asked the woman why she had come to Bar Harbor.
"She told me that a lot of people are doing this well, but that Jackson Lab is the gold standard," Goldthwait says. "This place holds a special place in the hearts of scientists. This is the place that made the mouse work."
Goldthwait has seen the dedication of the lab's scientists, noticing them working at all hours. She remembers groups of researchers at a fire drill, standing outside and chatting about their work, piecing together the puzzles even during an inconvenient break. She's met many mouse handlers, the group of people-many with only a high-school diploma-who care for the mice, always with an eye toward finding unusual specimens for further study.
"The scientists, and their commitment to their goals, are amazing to me," Goldthwait says. "But the mouse handlers know how important they are, as well. Across the board, the people who work here are committed to the mission. There's a fire inside people here, and that's what makes the place what it is."
Like all nonprofit research centers, Jackson Lab relies on government grants, especially money from the National Institutes of Health, and donations. The funding environment is changing, and Jackson Lab is always adapting (see "Bench to Bedside," page 19) to the federal fundraising environment.
State funding is important, because it helps build the bricks-and-mortar infrastructure that makes landing large federal grants more realistic.
"The federal government doesn't want to build buildings for us," Knowles says. "They want to pay for research, not buildings."
The facilities bring in the world-class scientists, who bring in federal money. Investigators lead teams and need staffs, so that each is responsible for 10 to 12 jobs at the lab. Essentially, the investigators are entrepreneurs. While they receive some institutional start-up funds from the lab, they have to fund their own studies through grants, becoming self-sufficient.
In the last five years, Maine voters have approved $45 million in bonds to fund biomedical research. Officials at Jackson Lab claim they and others leveraged that money into more than $275 million in grants.
"We've been able to prove that if we build labs, the funding for research will come," Peterson says.
The commitment, lab officials say, will have to be steady, and long-running. The voters of Maine may have to be patient. Jackson Lab will always be dependent on funding sources, particularly the government. The lab does better than most at garnering grants, with a 50% success rate on applications, compared to the national average of 30%.
"We're always focused on what's going to happen in the next 10 years," Knowles says. "We always have to be ahead of the game so that we can catch that money."
Catching that money is vastly important in the nonprofit research universe. And Jackson Lab has done well. This summer, the campus hums with the sounds of construction machinery, as the centerpiece of the lab's latest major expansion, the East Research Building, takes shape. The building is the last piece of a $61.1-million expansion project, scheduled for completion early next year. Some of the funding for the expansion came from a state bond proposal, passed in 2003. Federal funds were also obtained.
The growth means good things for Jackson Lab, which will be able to stay at the forefront in such areas as stem-cell research, seeking cures for cancer and other diseases. It's good for scientists around the world, and for the students-from Maine and elsewhere-who have access to a world-class scientific facility.
Finally, the growth means jobs: The lab plans to recruit eight to 10 investigators to fill the new buildings, which could mean as many as 200 new employees.
"We think what we're doing is good for Maine and good for Maine's economy," says Woychik. "We have a three-part mission of research, resources, and education. But we're also good business for Maine."
SIDEBAR: JaX by the Numbers
76: Years in operation
2.1 million: Mice distributed in fiscal 2004
12,000: Number of labs who received mice
63: Countries with JAX mice
3,000: Approximate number of mouse strains available
2 million: Number of frozen mice embryos in the lab's repository
750,000: Living mice at any one time in Jackson's mouse rooms
95: Percent of Jackson Lab revenue that comes from outside Maine
83: Percent of budgeted funds that are spent in-state
1,276: Employees as of June 6, 2005, more than double the 1997 total
265: Towns in Maine with smaller populations than Jackson Lab's campus
465: Research staff members, including 179 PhDs, MDs, and DVMs
$43,000: Average salary of Jackson Lab worker
22%: Total employment growth in Maine, 2000-2004
23%: Loss of Maine manufacturing jobs over the same period
44%: Job growth in biomedical research sector
SIDEBAR: bench to bedside
A scientific clichŽ describes the application of pure research to practical use as taking knowledge from the lab "bench to the bedside." These days, the federal government, most notably the National Institutes of Health, is demanding a strong connection to the bedside before choosing to fund scientific research. NIS is pushing for interdisciplinary research, connecting math and computer science with physical science, to speed that connection.
To compete for grants, Jackson Laboratory must adapt. And it has.
"We've been looking for ways to get everyone working together, forming a new way of thinking about science and research," says Barbara Knowles, Ph.D., Jackson's vice president of training, education and collaboration. "And we're working to train the next generation of scientists, who will need to think that way from the start."
The lab fulfills its new fundraising goals partly by collaboration. Two partnerships have made news recently, including one that will bring a 5,000-square-foot research facility to Brewer, and a graduate school to Bangor: the Maine Institute for Human Genetics and Health.
The effort, which connects the University of Maine (Orono), Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, MDI Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove, and Jackson Lab, will employ five staff scientists and a technical staff to identify and pursue opportunities to push basic research toward clinical applications. The staff will be supported by students from the new UMaine Graduate School of Biomedical Services.
"We believe we can improve the quality of patient care in this part of the state," lab director Richard Woychick, Ph.D., says, "and lead investment in projects that happen in this part of the state."
The Institute for Molecular Biophysics (IMB), a collaborative research facility with UMaine and Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough, opened at Jackson this spring. This summer, the lab will install the 4Pi Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope, the world's most powerful microscope, capable of displaying, in 3-D, the tiniest pieces of gene matter.
"We're reaching out to the other institutions in the state to bring these centers of excellence in new ways," Woychick says. "We want to create a virtual research institution that spans Maine, and allows all of us to be more successful."
To learn more about Jackson Lab's collaborative projects, visit www.jacksonlab.com.
