Twenty years after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen created the bioscience research center that bears his name, Seattle’s Allen Institute is still pushing out into new frontiers. But this weekend, the nonprofit institute — and its hometown — are taking a little time to celebrate.
All this week, the Allen Institute has been highlighting Open Science Week, which touches upon one of the core values that Allen had in mind when he launched the institute with a $100 million donation on Sept. 16, 2003. Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine are giving the festivities an extra boost by issuing proclamations designating Saturday as “Open Science Day” in the Emerald City and its environs.
Speaking of emeralds, a gaggle of Seattle landmarks will be lit up in emerald green this weekend in honor of the institute’s 20th anniversary. The list includes the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, Two Union Square, the Great Wheel, the Pacific Science Center, the Seattle Convention Center, Rainier Square — and of course, the Allen Institute’s seven-story headquarters on South Lake Union.
On Sept. 28, the institute is planning a free public event to showcase the open-science discoveries and tools that have emerged over the past 20 years. (Check the institute’s website to sign up for in-person or virtual attendance.)
Back in 2003, the institute was devoted exclusively to brain science, with the goal of creating the Allen Brain Atlas and mapping the role of genes in brain development. The institute’s researchers began by analyzing thin slices of mouse brains, and leveraged the expertise they gained to produce gene-coded maps of the human brain starting in 2010.
Brain science is still a focus of the institute’s research, but over the years, its mission has expanded. Cell science was added to the portfolio in 2014, and just after Paul Allen’s death in 2018, the institute launched an immunology division with $125 million from the software billionaire’s estate. The most recent addition is the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, which was created in 2021.
An organizationally separate counterpart focusing on artificial intelligence — the Allen Institute for AI, or AI2 — was founded in 2014.
Neuroscientist Rui Costa, who was named the institute’s CEO and president in late 2021, told GeekWire that Jody Allen, Paul Allen’s sister and the executor and trustee of his estate, has been “extremely supportive” of the institute. So has the rest of the institute’s board of directors.
“They say, ‘Let’s go for the next 20 years of impact,'” Costa said.
The institute’s staff is on track to rise beyond 800 employees by the end of the year. Its treasure trove of scientific data is at the 500-petabyte level and on its way to reaching an exabyte (that’s a quintillion bytes, or a billion gigabytes) sometime next year. “By 2024, the data that we’ve produced will be on the scale of what CERN has provided for particle physics,” Costa said.
So what are the institute’s biggest achievements? Costa says he has three favorites: the publication of the first Allen Mouse Brain Atlas in 2006, this year’s characterization of what a normal cell should look like … and a discovery that Costa can’t talk about yet because it’s awaiting publication.
“Perhaps bigger than any individual discovery, our most monumental achievement has been advancing the open science movement,” Costa added.
All of the institute’s databases are open-source and freely available to outside researchers, the way Paul Allen intended them to be. “More publications have been produced by outside institutions using our data than what we’ve produced internally,” Costa said. “We think that’s a good thing.”
Twenty years ago, the open-science approach to sharing research was uncommon. “And then it became a thing,” Costa said. “Now we are in a position where we’re doubling down on the concept. We go for complete projects that cannot be handled by an individual lab, but rather by interdisciplinary teams that work together for 10 to 15 years on the project.”
In addition to its four research divisions, the Allen Institute forges partnerships with other research centers through its Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group. The ranks of Allen Distinguished Investigators include Nobel-winning gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna and Nobel-winning evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo. “We complete projects and change questions, but we don’t change super-fast,” Costa said. “We focus on what we think are the most pertinent questions, and then dive in deep.”
Now the institute is considering research questions having to do with how environmental factors and climate change affect life, how synthetic biology can be used to gain new insights into human health and disease, and how neuroscience can shed light on issues relating to mental health and addiction. There’s currently an open call for proposals to study the neurobiological effects of human-caused environmental changes — with up to $10 million to be awarded to the research team that’s selected.
What would Paul Allen, the self-described “Idea Man,” think of all this?
“When the Allen Institute was founded two decades ago, it began with brain science and a quest to map all of the genes in the mouse brain, and share our data for free,” Costa said in an email. “That was followed by launching new institutes for cell science, immunology and neural dynamics. Today, I believe Paul would marvel at the growing convergence of these different disciplines, and the incredible new computational tools that will help us make discoveries that — just 20 years ago — seemed nearly impossible.”
