FOREWORD 
The year 1988-89 has been one of great excite- 
ment for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute 
(HHMI), as the expansion in both the size and the 
scope of the Institute's activities has continued. 
The largest and most long-standing of the 
Institute's programs, which has come to be known 
as the First Program, involves the conduct of bio- 
medical research by its investigators in a large num- 
ber of laboratories across the country, and is the 
principal subject of this report. The extensive and 
extremely high quality research accomplishments 
of the Institute scientists are described in detail 
later in this volume. There have been similarly aus- 
picious developments in other programs, which I 
shall review briefly here. 
The Second Program comprises several activities 
that are closely related to and support the First Pro- 
gram, including scientific meetings and workshops. 
This year the format of the Institute's regular scien- 
tific meetings was modified; instead of the meetings 
focusing on program areas such as Genetics or Cell 
Biology and Regulation, topical meetings were or- 
ganized, e.g., "Receptors and Receptor Mecha- 
nisms" and "Regulation of Gene Expression." By all 
accounts these meetings were a great success, and 
in addition to their excellence and depth of cover- 
age of important topics, they served to bring to- 
gether investigators from different Institute pro- 
grams and promote cross-fertilization of ideas and 
collaborations. The joint program with the National 
Institutes of Health (NIH) at the Cloister on the 
NIH campus, in which students come from many 
medical schools and spend a year as HHMI research 
scholars in NIH laboratories, has continued to pros- 
per, attracting students who receive excellent re- 
search training and stimulating them to go on to 
research careers. HHMI has also maintained its sup- 
port of databases concerned with the rapid accu- 
mulation of knowledge on the mapping of the 
human genome and of genes involved in human 
diseases. In the past year, support was initiated for 
a new relational genome database at The Johns 
Hopkins University School of Medicine. 
The Third Program of the Institute, its grants 
program, which began only in 1987, completed its 
second full year on August 31, 1989. In this short 
time the grants program has grown spectacularly, 
providing vitally needed support for biomedical 
education. In the last fiscal year, approximately $42 
million in grants were awarded, including new 
grants to 51 undergraduate colleges of research 
universities, to the Marine Biological Laboratories 
in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, for their specialized 
courses in the biological sciences, and to the In- 
stitute of Laboratory Animal Research. The first 47 
awards of medical student research fellowships 
were made in a new program modeled on the 
highly successful program at the Cloister, except 
that the students spend a research year in their 
own or another medical school rather than going 
to the NIH. A new postdoctoral fellowship program 
designed to provide physicians with extensive train- 
ing in basic science was also launched. The new 
and ongoing Grants and Special Programs activities 
are summarized more fully later in this volume. 
One of the most exciting events of the past year 
was the beginning of the planning of a new head- 
quarters and conference center for the Institute on 
a beautiful 22.5 acre plot of land in Chevy Chase, 
Maryland. An architectural firm, the Hillier Group 
from Princeton, New Jersey, was engaged in Febru- 
ary 1989, and the design process was well along at 
the close of the fiscal year. This complex will serve 
as the headquarters for all the Institute's research 
and grants activities and as a scientific home for the 
Institute's investigators when they return for scien- 
tific meetings and visits. Completion of construc- 
tion is anticipated in early 1992. 
The increase in the scope of the Institute's activi- 
ties is reflected in the size of the HHMI community. 
On August 31, 1989, there was a total of 1,793 em- 
ployees nationwide, with a staff" of 176 at the head- 
quarters in Bethesda and 1 1 at the Cloister. A full 
description of the Institute's research activities and 
personnel follows. 
Purnell W. Choppin, M.D. 
President 
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