Synthetic biology and Howard Hughes

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has announced its latest set of investigator appointments. Awards are made to individuals, as opposed to the usual mode of funding, where money is assigned to a project, and the field of synthetic biology is represented by two of its leading figures in the current crop. Jim Collins at Boston and Michael Elowitz at Caltech both had papers in the important 2000 issue of Nature, which reported some of the first experimental results in the area (specific papers are here and here.)