People, Place and Proximity
By David Skinner – Originally posted 31/05/2023
The sum of the campus is meant to be greater than its parts but what are the actual or hoped for benefits of collecting so much and so many in one place? It is worth reflecting on the significance attached to proximity in the vision of the biomedical campus, the assumption that by bringing people and activities together in one location important things will happen.
There are different coming-togethers underlying the headline assumption that it is good to be together. Firstly, proximity is thought to act as an accelerator of knowledge creation and dissemination: concentrating groupings of scientists and laboratories in one building or one collection of buildings facilitates new connections and collaborations and the sharing of experience and expertise. Scientists also benefit, the reasoning goes, from economies of scale and shared access to expensive equipment.
Royal Papworth (left) and Heart and Lung Research Institute (right) – Taken by David Skinner 21/3/23
A second coming together is of science and medicine, expressed materially in the layout of the campus. Thus, a new Heart and Lung Research Institute has been built a few metres from Royal Papworth Hospital. This proximity of health care and research which was previously hidden inside the hospital buildings in part accommodates the professional lives of hi-flying medics who are both working doctors and active knowledge creators. More profoundly, it reflects the importance of patients to biomedical science as objects for training and research, subjects to trial new treatments, as data points in statistical studies, as champions of research, and donors of bodily materials.
Last but no means least, the campus is also a coming together of the private, public, and charitable sectors. The State is present as the NHS and through science funders such as the Medical Research Council (MRC). The Cancer Research Institute is a partnership between the charity Cancer Research and Cambridge University. The most high profile private sector presence on campus is in the yet to be completed headquarters of the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. Faith in the future of biocapitalism is also expressed in a new building now taking shape on the edge of the campus that will house smaller start-up and spin-off life science companies.
The significance of proximity and the multiple connections it can support is encapsulated in the career of one Cambridge scientist, Nobel Prize winner and former Master of Trinity College Greg Winter. I recommend listening to this interview with Winter first broadcast in 2019 for the Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific. Winter has spent his working life at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). A photograph of the original LMB building opened on the campus site in 1962 is below. This building has since been repurposed as part of the University School of Clinical Medicine but is hard to recognise in the jumble of development that has subsequently taken place around the Addenbrookes entrance.
External view of the original LMB building, taken circa 1962 from the hospital side looking up from Hills Road (copyright MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology)
Winter’s career has focused on understanding and engineering antibodies. This project began in the early 1980s driven by intellectual curiosity but in the decades that followed has led to techniques and treatments that have had huge impact. The resulting drugs have been very effective and highly profitable: in 2018 the breast cancer drug Herceptin had sales of $6 billion and the anti-inflammatory Humira had sales of $17 billion.
During his interview Winter explains his transformation from a ‘pure’ scientist to someone intent on maximising the benefits of his discoveries by telling an anecdote that centres on the proximity of Addenbrookes to the LMB. When cancer researchers trialled a new treatment based on his work on manipulating antibodies, they reported that their first patient wanted to meet Winter. He had “never met a patient before” but donned a white coat and borrowed a stethoscope and made the short walk to the hospital. There he found the patient, sitting up in bed knitting. She told Winter how pleased she was that the experimental treatment would prolong her life so that she could care for her dying husband. Winter tells the interviewer that the realisation that he had been able to help this patient had a huge effect and made him think “I had better rearrange my priorities.”
Winter’s career was initially firmly rooted in the university and publicly funded basic science. He worked with the Medical Research Council to ensure the techniques to ‘humanise’ mouse antibodies, that could have been locked up with a patent, were instead available to all scientists. Then the story becomes more complicated: Winter concluded that he could only fully realise the potential of his research by working in and with the private sector. Winter’s start-up company Cambridge Antibody Technology was eventually acquired in 2006 by AstraZeneca for £700 million, this was the first of a series of ventures built and eventually sold on to large pharmaceutical corporations.
So there are all kinds of entanglement – science and medicine, researchers and patients, the State and capitalism – in one person’s account of their career. This is why, when I have taken groups walking around the campus site, I have often paused outside the impressive replacement LMB building opened in 2013, turned towards the new AstraZeneca headquarters taking shape across the road, pointed out the hospital in the background, and retold Winter’s story.