Chris Kaiser, who had been selected as the NIGMS director, withdrew his candidacy on April 23 for personal reasons, so a new search for a permanent NIGMS director will need to be initiated. I will continue to serve as acting NIGMS director during this process. When a vacancy announcement for the position is available, we’ll share it with you. In the meantime, you can read a post about the previous search process.

Last October, I told you that NIGMS would be commemorating its 50th anniversary in 2012.  We hope you will help us mark this milestone by participating in our upcoming anniversary events, which include sessions at scientific meetings and a special symposium on the NIH campus that will feature talks by three outstanding NIGMS-funded investigators as well as poster presentations by NIGMS-supported undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral scientists.

Another way to get involved is to provide a personal reflection about NIGMS. I want to thank those who have already sent theirs and encourage everyone to take a few minutes to read them. I hope they will inspire you to send in one of your own. We welcome individual or group contributions of any length and in any format (text, audio or video).

As we told you in an earlier post, NIGMS turns 50 this year. One of the ways we’re marking this milestone is by sponsoring speakers or symposia at a number of scientific society meetings.

We’ve already been to the Society for Glycobiology and the American Society for Cell Biology meetings, and in the coming months, we’re headed to these additional venues:

• Biophysical Society
• United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation
• Genetics Society of America
• International Society for Computational Biology
• American Chemical Society
• Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science
• Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students

If you’ll be at one of these meetings, please come to our sponsored session to hear from our grantees and meet some of our staff. Also, please acknowledge NIGMS funding support during your meeting talks and poster presentations, and feel free to use one of our 50th anniversary logos for this purpose.

To highlight our commitment to training, we’re also sponsoring student or postdoctoral fellow poster awards at a number of these events. We’ll invite poster award winners to present their work at the NIGMS 50th anniversary symposium at NIH on October 17. Stay tuned for details about that event in a future post.

As the director of NIGMS from 1974 to 1993, Ruth L. Kirschstein molded the Institute’s agenda for basic science, research training and promoting diversity. She also set a tone for the Institute that remains to this day. After leaving NIGMS, Ruth went on to serve as the deputy director of NIH, and, for two periods, she was NIH’s acting director. From the time she recruited me to NIGMS in 1981 until her death in 2009, Ruth was also my mentor and friend, as she was to many others who worked for or interacted with her. A new biography by science writer Alison Davis, Always There: The Remarkable Life of Ruth Lillian Kirschstein, M.D., tells the inspiring story of a scientist, physician, administrator, leader, humanitarian, classical pianist, lover of music and art, and devoted wife and mother. This amazing, multitasking woman really was “always there.” I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about an extraordinary woman and her dedication and many contributions to NIH and beyond. The book is available for free in several digital formats.

In the first major reorganization of NIGMS since 1994, we have just established two new divisions that bring together existing NIGMS programs with programs transferred to NIGMS from the former National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). These changes give us the opportunity to create synergies and strengthen efforts in areas that are central to our mission.

The Division of Training, Workforce Development, and Diversity (TWD) merges NIGMS research training programs with activities that were previously in the Institute’s Division of Minority Opportunities in Research (MORE). It also houses the Institutional Development Award program from NCRR. Our decision to create this division was informed by input we received from many stakeholders, and it responds to key goals and recommendations of our strategic plans. Its director is Clif Poodry, who formerly directed the MORE Division.

The Division of Biomedical Technology, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology (BBCB) combines programs of our Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) with biomedical technology programs from NCRR. Karin Remington, who previously directed CBCB, is the director of this new division.

You might be wondering what the reorganization will mean for your current or future funding. The amount of money allocated to programs in the new divisions will not change as a result of the reorganization or the transfer of NCRR programs to NIGMS. The review of applications will stay the same, too, as will most of the staff who manage the grants and review the applications.

Our current organizational chart shows all six NIGMS divisions, including the two new ones.

I’ve been at NIGMS for many years—first as a program director, then as a division director and twice as acting Institute director. One of the things I like best about all these jobs is having a bird’s-eye view of the rapid evolution of science. The reorganization that is taking place at NIGMS reflects this evolution and, I expect, will enable NIGMS to further enhance the pace of science.

NIGMS turns 50 in 2012! To mark this important milestone, we’re planning a variety of activities throughout the year, including sessions at scientific society meetings and a symposium on the NIH campus on October 17, 2012. We’re also planning a special page on the NIGMS Web site where you can share your perspectives on the Institute and its role. We invite you to describe how NIGMS has had an impact on your research or institution, or how it has made a difference in your field. We also welcome your memories or reflections on other relevant topics. The length and format (text, audio, video, image) are up to you. Text can be entered on the NIGMS 50th Anniversary Personal Reflections page (no longer available). We’ll compile the submissions and post an assortment of them on our Web site in early 2012. While there is no specific deadline, we’d like to receive as many contributions as possible by the end of 2011. Finally, as a way of sharing our anniversary with the broader scientific community, you may wish to use our 50th anniversary logo (link no longer available) during 2012 on posters and other materials about NIGMS-funded research.

NIH Director Francis Collins today announced his selection of Chris A. Kaiser as the new director of NIGMS. Dr. Kaiser expects to begin his appointment here in the spring of 2012. We are delighted by this news, and we appreciate the efforts of the NIH search committee in identifying and vetting candidates for the position. A leading cell biologist, Dr. Kaiser has been head of the Department of Biology at MIT since 2004. He joined the MIT faculty in 1991 and became a full professor in 2002. Dr. Kaiser is not new to the NIGMS community—he has been an NIGMS grantee since 1992 and has served on several NIH review committees. His research uses yeast to study the basic mechanisms of protein folding and intracellular transport, particularly how secreted and other proteins form disulfide bonds. He started this work as a graduate student at MIT in David Botstein’s lab, then expanded on it during a postdoctoral fellowship with Randy Schekman at the University of California, Berkeley. He plans to continue his research at NIH. In the NIH news release on his selection, Dr. Kaiser said, “In taking this position, I feel a compelling call to duty for national service and to be an advocate for the basic research enterprise.” We welcome his leadership and vision, and we very much look forward to working with him.

We are pleased that Bruce Beutler, who has been an NIGMS grantee since 2000, is a recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. He was cited for “discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity.” We congratulate him on this great honor.

Beutler has been at the Scripps Research Institute since 2000 but is moving back to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, which is where he worked when he discovered the receptor for endotoxin in 1998.

While we did not support him at that time, we began funding him shortly thereafter to further explore this seminal discovery. Our first grant to him was titled “TLR4 as an LPS Sensor and Susceptibility Locus,” and our second was titled “Mutagenic Analysis of LPS Responses.” The latter grant, which is still active, was awarded as an R01 in 2003 and converted to an R37 (MERIT Award) in 2008.

With this support, Beutler pioneered the use of a novel mutagenesis process in model systems to characterize several key intermediates in the Toll-like receptor signaling pathway of the innate immune response. These and other advances have formed a molecular framework for a deeper understanding of innate immunity, which is essential for normal host defense but which can also go awry, causing chronic inflammatory diseases and sepsis.

Today’s Nobel news comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that the National Medal of Science will go to two of our grantees, Jackie Barton of Caltech and Peter Stang of the University of Utah.

And at the other end of the career spectrum, NIGMS grantee Sara Sawyer of the University of Texas at Austin is among the 20 NIH-funded scientists who were just selected for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This award is the nation’s highest honor for scientists at the beginning of their professional careers.

We congratulate these grantees on their notable recognitions.

The Lasker Awards recognize major contributions to understanding and treating, curing or preventing disease. The 2011 prizes were announced yesterday, and we're proud that two former NIGMS grantees, Franz-Ulrich Hartl of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and Arthur L. Horwich of the Yale School of Medicine, are being honored with the Basic Medical Research Award. Hartl and Horwich are cited for their discoveries about the cell's protein-folding machinery, particularly the identification of chaperonin, which shifted the paradigm of how proteins fold. The field of protein folding is a great example of the importance of the basic research that NIGMS funds and how it lays the foundation for medical advances—in this case, shedding light on diseases linked to misfolding or aggregation, such as Alzheimer's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. We're also delighted that the NIH Clinical Center was selected to receive the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award. We congratulate all of the recipients on these well-deserved honors.

The revised regulations on extramural investigators’ financial conflicts of interest have been published in the Federal Register. The final rule is based on input NIH received from the community. The revised regulations, as outlined by NIH’s Sally Rockey, now:

• Require investigators to disclose to their institutions all of their significant financial interests related to their institutional responsibilities as opposed to only those that they see as related to Public Health Service (PHS)-supported research.

• Lower the monetary threshold for disclosure of significant financial interests, from $10,000 to $5,000.

• Require institutions to report to the PHS awarding component more comprehensively on identified financial conflicts of interest and how they are being managed.

• Require institutions to make certain information concerning identified financial conflicts of interest held by senior/key personnel accessible to the public.

• Require investigators to be trained on the regulations and their institution’s financial conflict of interest policy at designated times.

NIH is developing training materials, which will be posted on its Financial Conflict of Interest website. For more details, visit the “quick links.”