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Research to thrive in lab facility by Dick Peterson Public Relations Administrators proliferate. And they proliferate administratively. Aligned like boxcars in a train, each section of the MEHRL building is an open format, thematic lab to be used by groups from a number of institutions collaborating on mutual research interests. That’s why the building under construction down at the end of Ft. Johnson Road in James Island by the entrance to Charleston Harbor, has lots of laboratory space for marine environmental health research, and virtually none for administration. An architect’s rendering shows what the finished MEHRL building will look like when construction is complete in December. Move-in is slated for February or March. Tongue-in-cheek snipes at administrators aside, what’s obvious about the Marine Environmental Health Research Laboratory—MEHRL, for short— is that somewhere in the architectural planning, someone took note of human nature and how to use it productively and efficiently to do research. And they integrated those factors with the special nature of the five federal and state research and education institutions to work there. Thursday, June 1, was a special day for those institutions—MUSC included. They marked the completion of the building’s superstructure with a “topping out” ceremony complete with the traditional evergreen tree.  Move-in is estimated to be in February or March. “We’re called the Ft. Johnson Five,” said MUSC’s Eric R. Lacy, Ph.D., director of Marine Biomedicine and Environmental Sciences at Ft. Johnson. The other agencies include: National Ocean Service’s Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research National Institutes of Standard and Technology Grice Marine Laboratory (College/University of Charleston) S.C. Department of Natural Resources. Now, that creates a problem. Some might call it an administrative nightmare. How do you house five institutions, two of them federal and three state, in a building federally funded and owned, its construction supported by S.C. Sen. Ernest Hollings, but built on state land?  Give them each their own area, right? Wrong! And here’s the genius in the MEHRL building: Instead of allocating a section for each institution, the building is partitioned—you can see each module from the outside—by research disciplines. Lacy named them as he pointed to each, aligned like boxcars in a train: “Environmental physiology, environmental molecular biology, environmental cellular biology and environmental toxicology,” he said. “These are open format, thematic labs that will be used by groups from a number of institutions collaborating on mutual research interests.” A cedar tree tops the highest point of the MEHRL building during a traditional topping-out ceremony June 1. The tree will be planted to become part of the building’s landscape. He said that a premium is put on collaborative research, even to the point that a research group with funding will have to demonstrate the collaborative nature of their work just to get space allocated to them. “There’s no place like this in the country,” Lacy said. “Not Woods Hole (Marine Biological Laboratory and Oceanographic Institution, Cape Cod, Mass.), not San Diego (Scripps Institute of Oceanography), not the University of Miami marine labs. There’s a powerful synergy here that makes this an attractive place for faculty, graduate students and post-docs to work.” And there are large fish tanks. Off to one end of the building is an area to accommodate large tanks of fish, shrimp and other ocean creatures—but no sea mammals—to conduct controlled toxicology studies, Lacy said. The facility will allow studies into the effects of environmental stress, including contaminants on aquatic organisms under highly controlled conditions. To accommodate studies with highly toxic compounds including those of biologic origins from algae and other microorganisms, the MERHL is equipped with BSL 3 labs and containment facilities. When tissue samples of aquatic organisms are taken after experimentation, they will no longer have to be transported back to MUSC for testing. Instead, they will be analyzed right there at Ft. Johnson where scientific interaction is free to flourish. Nuclear magnetic resonance, structural chemistry for heavy metal analysis, satellite global information systems, and the environmental challenge rooms where the molecular response of organisms to environmental stress can be tested are all part of the range of features to be housed in the MEHRL building. But the building’s architecture and collaborative nature of the research to be done there still doesn’t solve the administrative hurdles to be overcome. “It’s a whole new paradigm,” Lacy said, explaining that the refocus away from equipment and space ownership, turf protection and personnel management calls for an entirely different approach to administration. MEHRL research programs are overseen by an executive board of each institution’s president or the person he designates. A science board determines which research projects are to be given laboratory space in the building, its members chosen from each institution’s science committee. Other inter-institutional committees include safety, finance, administrative, and physical plant. “This is a joint project agreement. It’s five institutions that are going to work in this building to reach common goals and pursue common research interests,” Lacy said. They’re betting that with the right facilities, projects and administration the research scientists and students there will focus their efforts on “Marine Environmental Health Research Laboratory” science.