Research is done in all Hopkins divisions, not just those where government and private funding is available. Research is essential to building the new base of knowledge on which the teaching and service programs of a great university stand. Unusual at Hopkins, however, is the extraordinary level of external funding that its research attracts. This year such funding, secured through thousands of individual grants and contracts, from hundreds of sponsoring organizations, topped $1.0 billion. Genetic and molecular approaches to disease continued high on the Hopkins research agenda. An interdisciplinary team of Hopkins chemists and biophysicists, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, was the first to capture highly detailed images of the atomic structure of RNA. These images will help scientists understand RNA's significance to the origins of life and its role in regulating genes and pathogens. Another collaborative effort, between the School of Public Health and the Oncology Center, has produced a five-year $3.8 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to establish an innovative cancer genetics network. The Hopkins network will link with others around the country building a national resource for genetic research, genetic testing, and patient education. Acting on the certainty that genetics is the future of medicine, Hopkins Medicine has united its nine centers of genetics research, education, and treatment into a new institute named the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine. The institute honors Victor A. McKusick, widely recognized as the "father" of medical genetics, and Daniel Nathans, whose work with DNA earned a Nobel Prize in 1978 with Hopkins colleague Hamilton Smith and, more recently, the National Medal of Science, the country's highest scientific award. Bringing together numerous physicians and scientists, the institute will be housed in the new research tower planned for construction on the medical campus. Incorporated into the new institute is the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man project, an Internet-based database used globally by geneticists to share findings; the project received a $5.1 million contract from the National Library of Medicine this spring to continue its work. Disease-specific genetics research will be greatly accelerated by an $8.5 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to the School of Medicine for work on gene and pharmacological therapies for cystic fibrosis. The Hopkins Children's Center and the School of Public Health will run Baltimore's first Center of Excellence in Children's Environmental Health Research. A five-year $6.5 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will help Hopkins pediatricians and scientists to determine why Baltimore's school-aged children have asthma at a rate higher than the national average. The research will focus on environmental factors and their impact on our homes, schools, and daily lives. Building on an earlier commitment of $2.25 million, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations this year committed $20 million to create the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the School of Public Health. The institute will draw on broad expertise from within the School and throughout the University in pursuit of a multilevel agenda that includes training of fellows from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, continuing support to them in their home countries, in part by providing computer- and Web-based access to distance learning programs, strengthening the public health infrastructure, and generating research collaborations with an eye toward employing lessons learned in impoverished areas of Baltimore. With a $12.9-million five-year cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, the University has established an Engineering Research Center in Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology. As the nation's first research center set up to create computer-linked surgical systems and medical robots, the center will integrate highly advanced information technology with surgical expertise. Joining Hopkins engineering researchers in this venture are others from the School of Medicine, the Applied Physics Laboratory, MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Carnegie Mellon, and Shadyside Hospital. Industry donors have pledged $1.75 million in additional funds for the first year, and almost $9 million in industry funding is anticipated over the first five years of the program. NSF funding is renewable for an additional five years. After 10 years the center is expected to be financially self-sustaining. Ongoing research in the Department of Electrical Engineering in computational sensing, or "robot vision," will add more sophisticated capability to these systems. The flowering of biomedical engineering has added to the University's research base this year. Grants and gifts totaling $27 million will help to establish a biomedical engineering institute at Hopkins in the very near future. The Whitaker Foundation's grant of $17 million, added to a $10 million gift from Hopkins trustee A. James Clark, will be used to construct a 60,000-square-foot cutting-edge facility on the Homewood campus, housing new laboratories, classrooms, and computer capabilities, and to hire a dozen new faculty members in the Whiting School of Engineering. The Whitaker Foundation also funded individual Hopkins researchers; three young faculty in Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biophysics were among those who received "young investigator" grants of $210,000 over three years to help establish research careers. Considerable funding was received this year for work that is challenging the conventions of social welfare policy. The Department of Labor awarded a grant of $5 million to the Institute for Policy Studies to explore whether, given an opportunity to learn appropriate job skills and the availability of a means of documenting those skills for prospective employers, some of the hardest-to-employ can move from welfare into the kind of good-paying jobs that will allow them to break the poverty cycle. The School of Arts and Sciences is leading a multi-institutional project titled "Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Children," intended to determine how changes in welfare policies affect family life, particularly children. The project received $13.2 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and other units of the Department of Health and Human Services; $1 million from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation; and $500,000 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Combined support from federal and non-governmental sponsors will ultimately approach $20 million. Space research continues strong. Years of intense planning culminated in June in the spectacular launch of the FUSE (Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer) spacecraft. Funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at a cost of $100 million, FUSE is the first large-scale space mission to be fully planned and operated by an academic department of a university. It will study the conditions that prevailed right after the "Big Bang" and investigate the forces and processes involved in the evolution of galaxies, stars, and planetary systems. NASA has also awarded a $20 million eight-year grant to a small team of world-class astronomers, predominantly from Hopkins, to pursue research using the powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys. The instrument is scheduled for launch and coupling to the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2000. The grant will also support the hiring of 10 to 12 postdoctoral scientists and several graduate students and undergraduates to work on the project, which aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the nature and structure of the universe. The University's Applied Physics Laboratory has been chosen to be part of the inauguration of NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probe Program. Funded at $130 million with a maximum three-year development cycle, the TIMED (Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere, Energetics, and Dynamics) mission will open up to investigation by APL researchers one of the least explored and least understood regions of Earth's atmosphere, the portion located between 60 and 180 kilometers (40-110 miles) above the surface where solar X-ray and ultraviolet radiation is absorbed. Escalating public health problems have resulted in environmental studies becoming an increasingly important source of research support. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded a $300,000 grant, supplemented with $256,000 worth of in-kind support from American Waterworks Service Co., to investigators in the Whiting School's Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering to study the effectiveness of riverbank filtration in ridding drinking water of pathogens and other potentially harmful organic matter. Funds of $275,000 from NSF, Sandia National Laboratories, and concerned industrial companies supported complementary research in Civil Engineering for the creation of computational tools that will make reliable predictions about the spread of contamination through soil. The costs of environmental cleanup can then be more accurately gauged.

APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY At the Applied Physics Laboratory, a fourth floor addition to building 24 (top) added 50 offices, conference rooms, and teaming areas for members of the Strategic Systems Department. The new space also includes a high-tech facility called the Management Planning Center, which uses advanced digital communication technologies, including video teleconferencing and electronic seminar software, to support the department's business objectives. Building 26 (bottom) will provide additional office space when occupied in the first quarter of 2000. The new building will also accommodate a new Warfare Analysis Laboratory, a new Guidance System Evaluation Lab, several Cooperative Engagement Program and Wrap-Around Simulation Program facilities, and nine other specialized laboratories.       SCHOOL OF MEDICINE Cancer research and treatment at Hopkins will make a significant leap forward with the opening of the Bunting-Blaustein Cancer Research Building (top) in December of 1999 and the adjacent Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Building (bottom) the following month. The Weinberg Building will house medical and surgical facilities on nine floors with three floors of dedicated underground parking. Designated one of only 35 comprehensive cancer centers nationwide by the National Cancer Institute, the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Cancer Center in the Weinberg Building will give patients access to some of the most innovative and advanced therapies in the world. Across Broadway at the Bunting-Blaustein Building, more than 400 researchers and staff will employ state-of-the-art laboratories to make new discoveries in cancer biology, solid tumor research, molecular genetics, and a number of other key areas of cancer research. The two buildings were constructed at a cost of $184 million.

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