By Bill Brubaker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 2, 2006; D04

Speaking to 450 name-tagged techies in Northern Virginia yesterday, Thomas R. Cech, president of the Chevy Chase-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute, pointed to a chart ranking the nation's top biotechnology areas.

The San Francisco Bay area was No. 1 -- and no wonder, Cech said. The area is home to academic heavyweights such as Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, which guarantee the region's biotech firms a rich and steady supply of talent.

The area encompassing the District and Maryland was ranked No. 9, Cech said, nodding at the giant screen that displayed the rankings, because it has some fine universities and the National Institutes of Health -- "sort of a surrogate academic center."

And Northern Virginia?

That was Cech's point.

It was nowhere on the chart.

But that could change, Cech said, with the July 1 opening of the Hughes institute's $500 million Janelia Farm research center in Loudoun County.

Northern Virginia's high-tech industry has made a comeback since the tech bubble burst in 2001. But it is far from being a biotech hub.

Cech is betting Janelia will attract biotech firms to Loudoun, some eventually started by the same scientists Hughes will be hiring. Over the past two decades, about 100 Hughes scientists have used the research they did for Hughes to open biotech companies across the United States, he said.

The Loudoun County Department of Economic Development reports it has seen increased interest from pharmaceutical and biotech firms as a result of Janelia settling in the county. "But none has moved here yet," said Dorri O'Brien Morin, the department's business investment manager.

Cech's appearance at the Northern Virginia Technology Council breakfast yesterday was designed to give an overview of what Janelia will do, whom it might help and how.

There was no shortage of people willing to offer advice.

"I've been looking forward to the solution to the common cold," George Mason University School of Management Dean Richard J. Klimoski said as he introduced Cech, who won the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Cech didn't blink.

"Curing the common cold actually isn't on our short list of projects," he said as the audience howled. "But if we stumble across a cure on our way to other goals . . . we'll be sure to let you know."

Northern Virginia will get an infusion of brainpower when Janelia opens its doors: 300 scientists and staff members eventually will be based on the 281-acre campus in Ashburn. The complex, which will include a laboratory building, conference center and housing for visiting scientists, is 95 percent complete, Janelia director Gerald M. Rubin said yesterday.

Janelia's founders say their objective is simple: to tackle fundamental problems in biomedical research that are difficult to approach in academia or industry because they are costly and require expertise from disparate areas.

Much of Janelia's brainpower will study -- what else? -- the brain, working on organisms such as mice and fruit flies.

"The scientific focus is going to be to understand how neurons connect with each other to account for complex behavior," Cech said. "What would that be? Well, sort of like what you did this morning. You sensed that you were hungry. You located the food. You consumed the food, which takes a lot of neuromuscular action, and then you stopped when you were full. [That was] complex behavior. And there's a lot of neurons firing to make all of that work."