“Over the past 10 years, there’s been a growing recognition that we need science that does more than create basic knowledge,” says Jon Romig, architect and associate principal in the Boston office of The S/L/A/M Collaborative, a 180-member architecture, engineering, and planning firm with offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Connecticut. “We need to do scientific research that directly benefits people and the economy.”

This translates into a need for less lab space dedicated to science for science’s sake, and a greater need for labs doing research that result in a marketable product or service. In order to achieve this, labs need to be able to accommodate not just the current demand for the basic sciences required by biomedical research, but also the growing desire for a new kind of research space which includes the physical sciences, computation, and engineering—the PSCE laboratory.

These new buildings need to be flexible enough to adapt to the ever-shifting needs of the future, many of which are driven by changing patterns in federal funding.

“Much of the unprecedented lab construction has been in response to recent growth in life science funding, leading to an overabundance of biomedical research space,” says Romig. “That growth is now over. We project a growing surplus of biomedical research space in the U.S., some of which will have to serve other functions.”

Generally speaking, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds basic biomedical science research. Industry and the other federal science agencies fund most of the development of products and services, many of which result from that research. At present NIH devotes only about three percent of its budget to translational research.

“The NIH could fund more translational and PSCE research in the future,” says Romig, “but the NIH is a really big ship that’s hard to turn.”

There is mounting evidence of a significant funding shift away from the NIH and toward the other federal science agencies and the sciences they support, according to Jack Whitney, director of Midwest operations for S/L/A/M. The NIH saw its budget double between 1998 and 2003. Since then, accounting for inflation, NIH funding has fallen 13 percent. In the past five years, the success rate for NIH research grant applications has dropped from 31 percent to a projected 19 percent this year.

In the time it took to prepare the Tradeline presentation, the funding shifted once again and the new Congress has moved to get NIH funding back on track.

“Buildings need to be designed to be repositioned easily,” Whitney points out.

As of this writing, NIH is slated to receive a modest funding increase in 2008 of between 2.4 percent (House) and 3.2 percent (Senate), that will compensate for inflation but not make up for past losses.

In contrast, The National Science Foundation (NSF), after having a budget increase of just two percent in 2006, is in line for a nine percent increase this year, and the NSF research grant success rate is at 24 percent. Other federal agencies that focus on PSCE research, including DOE, NIST, NOAA, EPA, and NASA, will receive funding increases in 2008 that range from 10 percent to 29 percent.

Institutions must position themselves to take advantage of increased funding in PSCE research by increasing construction of new PSCE-capable facilities; retrofitting biomedical space to PSCE; developing flexible facilities that can toggle between biomedical and PSCE; and repositioning biomedical researchers to seek PSCE funding, pursuing new or existing investigations. However, the only thing certain about the future of research funding is the sheer uncertainty of it.

Sometimes the need to shift course comes not from the funding source, but from the maturing of the work that an organization does. Building needs change as an organization evolves from the basic research stage to a mix of research and product development, therapies, and manufacturing. This trend mirrors the larger forces at work in the knowledge industries. For example, a building renovation for Genzyme’s Diagnostics Division in Framingham, Mass., started as a research lab dedicating more than 50 percent of its square footage to that purpose. Now it will have a broader mix of spaces, with only about 10 percent still used for basic research. With products to make and sell, the rest of the building is needed for manufacturing, quality control, administration, marketing, and sales.

The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, has historically done basic biomedical research funded primarily by the NIH. The institution’s master plan provides for significant growth in the next 10 years, with major growth in PSCE areas including nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and translational medicine, fueled in part by funding from non-NIH sources such as the NSF.

“The Jackson Laboratory master plan is not prescriptive,” says Romig. “A 21st century master plan for a research organization needs to be open and flexible to accommodate opportunities as they arise.”

A Different Kind of Lab

The key to a successful PSCE lab building is flexibility, with minimal fixed benches in ballroom-style labs with no columns and easy access to services.

“PSCE flexibility is all about infrastructure, including more interstitial space and oversized shafts,” says Romig. “In a biomedical lab, flexibility has more to do with moving teams around; it’s operational flexibility involving moving people and small things. In contrast, the new nano-biotechnology labs at Notre Dame have to be flexible enough to accommodate entirely different activities, from cell culture to mechanical testing.”

These labs are outfitted with extra ventilation, specialty gas piping systems, and a robust electrical raceway system that accommodates different voltages.

“These need to be robust buildings, but there are cost ramifications,” he says. “High-infrastructure lab spaces may end up being used as researcher office space because of the uncertainty of future needs. Unfortunately, we can no longer limit construction costs by freezing the ratios of lab to lab support and office space.”

The most obvious difference between a PSCE lab and a biomedical lab is one of scale.

“The biomedical research building of the recent past actually has very limited capability to accommodate the research programs of the future,” indicates Whitney. “PSCE buildings need to be able to accommodate every kind of equipment, much of it floor-mounted. Many of these PSCE researchers are working at the scale of machines, not molecules. A client in Indiana, for example, is experimenting with biofuels, and they run engines in their labs.”

Biomedical labs are typically 14 or 15 feet high, floor to floor. PSCE labs require at least 16 feet or more for the additional mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services; depending on the activity within the lab, some high bay spaces are as tall as 20 or 25 feet. In addition, interior construction often needs to be more durable to withstand the movement and operation of heavy equipment, so masonry is required in place of drywall.

The growth of visualization as a research tool also requires new dimensional criteria. At Notre Dame University’s Jordan Hall of Science, for example, the 136-seat Digital Visualization Theatre required a clear span of 50 feet, and a clear height of 34 feet. The theater is used for imaging in disciplines from physics to biology to chemistry.

Vibration control is another major issue. A biomedical lab may require vibration levels below 2,000 micro-inches per second, while the recommended level for a PSCE lab is 500 and 125 for some areas. The issue in these labs is not only one of preventing environmental vibration from infiltrating the lab, but also preventing vibration created within the lab from emanating to the rest of the building.

In the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, for example, researchers test the structural integrity of satellites by shaking a heavy platform under them. The test takes place in a high bay lab where a seam in the floor slab allows the center of the floor to vibrate independently. Not far away in the same building, engineers assemble the delicate satellites in labs that must be protected from vibrations.

Notre Dame’s Engineering Nanotechnology Research Building exemplifies the diverse activities possible in a PSCE building. A generic modular lab infrastructure is provided in the design, but for the 2006 move-in a demanding program was in place. On the ground floor is a mechanical testing lab, with a sealed concrete floor, hydraulic equipment, and multiple specialty gases; it is equipped with ovens, hardness testing device, environmental chambers, and bending machines. Next door is a tribology manufacturing lab equipped with friction testing and knee- and hip-bending devices. Cutting and grinding equipment can be found in the adjacent design, fabrication, and manufacturing lab. Next to that is a prototyping lab outfitted with humidity and temperature control and separate HVAC controls, and equipped with UV curing equipment, a clean hood, and sand blasting equipment. A micromechanics lab has an isolated slab for vibration control and air, vacuum, and specialty gases. And that’s just the ground floor. The second floor has a histology prep lab, surgery suite, biohazard and biomaterials characterization lab, microphage lab, cell tissue and biomaterials processing lab.

As researchers pursue new avenues, these labs will be called upon to accommodate activities that may not even exist yet.

“We have just begun to exploit what we’ve learned,” says Romig.

By Lisa Wesel

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