Imagine that the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute teamed up with a megacharity and a university to buy land in the heart of New York City next to Grand Central Station and agreed to spend more than $1 billion to build a biomedical research facility there. And as part of the project, the famed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island would close, with only some of its labs relocated to the new facility. That suggests the scope, and controversy, of the ambitious project U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown unveiled last week when he announced the sale of a key central London site to a coalition composed of the government's Medical Research Council (MRC), two medical charities, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, and University College London (UCL). Next to the reopened St. Pancras station, which has high-speed rail links to the rest ofEurope, the groups plan to build a £500 million-plus facility—£85 million for the land, about £350 million for the building, and the rest for equipment—that will house some 1500 scientists, many of them from MRC's celebrated National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). "This is going to be great for British medical science, European medical science, and world medical science," says UCL Vice-Provost Edward Byrne.
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