The National Institutes of Health (NIH), flush with cash thanks to strong congressional support for biomedicine in recent years, is to enter the synchrotron construction company. Yesterday, officials of the NIH announced plans to spend $ 18 million this year to help pay for upgrades to and synchrotrons California- based in New York, which ricochet powerful X-ray beams out materials to determine their atomic structure . NIH officials say they hope the money will help meet the growing demand for "beam time" among biologists seek to reveal the secrets of the cell at the atomic scale.
synchrotrons have long been a favored tool among physicists, chemists and materials scientists, making funding for stage size machines province Department of Energy (DOE). But the ministry strapped increasingly sought NIH to help, as the number of researchers in biology in plants proliferated around 5% in 190 to almost one third in 1997. with the genome project churning of new protein sequences by hundreds, demand should grow. "We said that we must do something about it," says Marvin Cassman, who heads NIH National Institute of General medical sciences in Bethesda, Maryland
much this something -. $ 14 million - will kick-off of a 4 year, $ 53 million upgrade of the storage ring central electron synchrotron Stanford Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) in Menlo Park, California. When completed in 02, updated the ring, which produces highly focused X-ray beams popular with users, should generate 10 to 100 times the power of X-rays in progress, allowing researchers to collect data faster and the study of crystals smaller protein than they can now. The remaining $ 4 million will support new X-ray detectors and storage ring improvements to national synchrotron light source at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.
"I think it's extremely important," said the director SSRL Keith Hodgson of the new leadership of NIH. "Given the difficult economic climate in DOE, I think [upgrades] would have been difficult to remove." By supporting improvements to central storage rings, said Hodgson, NIH money will benefit not only biologists, but all users of the machines.
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