In solidarity with biologist Sydney Brenner, a 2002 Nobel prize awardee in Physiology or Medicine, who believes that the experimental animal of the 21^st century is man, researchers the world over, have been developing initiatives to bring the concept of translational medicine - 'from bench to bedside' - closer to reality.

Along these lines, the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (InStem), the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and the University of Edinburgh have recently set up a collaborative Center for Brain Development and Repair, to foster clinical research on brain disorders. The center will be based at inStem and directed by Sumantra Chattarji, with Siddharthan Chandran and Peter Kind from the University of Edinburgh as its Associate Directors. With an initial thrust on Autism Spectrum Disorders/Intellectual Disabilities (ASD/ID), the center will later expand its focus to develop novel therapeutic interventions for other degenerative brain disorders, such as dementia.

Sir John Savill, Vice-principal and Head of the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and Chief Executive of the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) was recently at NCBS, in connection with the collaboration and also to deliver a talk titled '100 years of the MRC'.

How do you envision the new collaboration with NCBS?

We're very excited about the collaboration with the Center for Brain Development and Repair and what excites me most is that it's grassroots up. It's the scientists themselves that want to collaborate. If you look at it top down, that also has beneficial outcomes: exchange of people and ideas. In 2011, the British government published a document called 'International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base', a study done by Elsevier which highlighted the importance of brain circulation, [not brain drain]. The essential idea was that if British scientists traveled around the globe, their citation impact was higher than if they stayed in the country and I think it would be the same for India. So we need British brains traveling to India and vice-versa.

How do you see clinical research developing in the future?

Well, great scientific leaders are known for their great turns of phrase. Sydney Brenner believes that the experimental animal of the 21^st Century is man. But, studies on humans are not limited to clinical research - discovering biology will include programs on humans too and humans can provide information on disease or just biology as well. In ten years, NCBS could have programs on human biology, together with mice, fishes and flies.

Your talk '100 years of the MRC' documenting landmark events in the MRC's history was interesting...

With the talk, I was looking to get new ideas on what the next 100 years might look like from young scientists here and I did get some good ideas. What came up included nanomachines, cell based therapy (a big thing in regenerative medicine), site specific drug delivery and biomechanics.

You also mentioned in your talk that working with industry is key to clinical research...

Yes, working with industry is very important because it brings new ideas into interventions, and industries have intervention drugs that you can use to do incisive studies on humans. For example, agents that block a pathway by inhibiting just one molecule - like the agent that blocks tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) and prevents inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. That agent was actually developed to treat septic shock, but never worked because it acted too late in the cascade of inflammatory events. The drug looked like a bust and the company that made it thought they would never get their money back. Very luckily for them, it found a different use!

So when we speak of clinical research on humans, who exactly are the volunteers here?

Well, there is a strong tradition of researchers themselves volunteering to participate. I've donated lots of blood that my lab can grow macrophages on, myself, and I've also borrowed lots of blood (laughs). But of course, we need an ethically sound partnership with patients, their families and normal subjects. The MRC has a long history of working with normal cohorts of people in this regard. The UK Biobank [a major health resource in the UK], is doing studies on 500,000 people aged between 40-69 years who have agreed to be followed for the rest of their lives for baseline investigations of brain function. And the DNA of all these 500,000 people will also be analyzed.

Then we have examples like the Australian researcher Barry Marshall who drank a Petri dish of cultured Helicobacter pylori (laughs).[With this, the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was proved to be responsible for peptic ulcers and won the Marshall team the 2005 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine].

So, getting normal people to volunteer is a way in which the public can engage with science, something NCBS is also very interested in doing?

Yes, and that is something we have a strong tradition of doing in Britain also, through a series of science festivals and outreach for children.

And, finally, since it came up, how does serendipity play into science in your view then?

Serendipity is enormously important (laughs). But a piece of luck comes more readily to the prepared mind - you must recognize when you're in a purple patch! I was talking to Sydney Brenner about this and he said he hates terms like hypothesis-free science. Scientists are at their best when they focus on a problem and serendipity may provide a new way of addressing the problem, but they must stay with the problem. Sydney Brenner also hates the phrase 'curiosity-driven science' because he thinks scientists should care about the problem.