The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is giving The Johns Hopkins University a $1 million grant to develop "a new graduate training program in Nanotechnology for Biology and Medicine".
Scientists who can straddle disciplines have always been hard to come by, perhaps because academics can be a bit snooty about "interdisciplinary" research. But where are there the greatest opportunities for innovation? You guessed it, at the boundaries between subjects.
The press release announcing the the grant quotes Denis Wirtz, who will serve as director of the programme, as saying: "To solve many of the toughest problems in diagnosing and treating patients, we need researchers who have outstanding skills in more than one discipline. For example, making tiny particles to carry drugs directly to diseased cells may require training in materials science as well as biology. But traditionally, researchers in these fields have not shared the same language or lab skills. We want to change that."
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