“One of our goals was to build a place where you can’t really predict what will happen.”

Dr. Brenda Andrews is describing the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, where she is Director. The Centre is located at the University of Toronto, in a sparkling glass tower built with the help of funds from the Ontario Innovation Trust.

To illustrate the open-ended research ethos at the CCBR, Dr. Andrews refers to the Centre’s recent recruitment of a leading analytical chemist. “His background is chemistry, but really, he’s an inventor who specializes in fabricating very small devices for looking at organisms. One of the things we’re doing here is putting people like him together with biologists who are thinking big—and frankly, I can’t predict where it will go.”

The Donnelly Centre was designed from the ground up to foster this kind of fruitful interaction. Welcoming lounge spaces, communal kitchens and green spaces dot the facility, encouraging the kinds of chance encounters and informal conversations that can lead to promising new lines of inquiry.

In some cases, research groups are deliberately spread across several floors to increase interpersonal contact. “We want to encourage people to go up and down and around,” says Dr. Andrews.

Even the plumbing plays a role in bringing different kinds of scientists together. In more traditional science buildings, services like water, waste and gas lines are contained in a central core. The pipes in the Donnelly Centre, however, are concentrated in the west wall, so that the central lab space on each floor can be creatively configured. This makes it possible for the “wet labs” of chemists, for instance, to co-exist on the same floor as the workstations of computational biologists. It also means that labs can be re-configured as the focus of research changes.

The approach is paying off. The profile created by the new building has been a key element in recruiting world-class scientific talent—a critical and increasingly difficult task in the life sciences, where global competition is intense. And already, researchers at the Centre are beginning to produce breakthrough insights on a key frontier—understanding the complex ways in which genes and proteins interact with one another.

“We’re just constantly searching for people who are thinking the right way,” says Dr. Andrews, referring again to the Centre’s open-ended, interdisciplinary approach. “Having this type of space is a good way to attract them and keep them here.”