In the 1990s, when Joseph Mayo, D.V.M, ran out of gas leading coworkers home from a meeting in Bethesda, he pulled over to the side of the road on I-270 and waited for help. He didn’t have to wait long; within a few minutes a passing motorist took pity on the group of scientists and offered them a lift back to Fort Detrick.

The Biopharmaceutical Development Program (BDP) at the Frederick National Laboratory is, for the first time ever, in a single building at the Advanced Technology Research Facility. At Fort Detrick, BDP operations were spread out in about a dozen buildings, resulting in redundancies in maintaining various utilities (air handlers, clean steam, WFI, etc.) for multiple buildings rather than one.

The Laboratory of Proteomics and Analytical Technologies, Antibody Characterization Laboratory, and Protein Chemistry Laboratory, previously located on different floors or in different buildings, are now together on the first floor of C wing in the ATRF.

John-Paul Denson and Troy Taylor of the Protein Expression Laboratory (PEL) used to pack liters of Escherichia coli lysates on ice, put them in the back of a microvan, and drive across campus to deliver the samples for protein purification. Now that all PEL staff members are working under the same roof at the Advanced Technology Research Facility (ATRF), transferring samples is just a walk down the hall. Staff members were previously spread out in five buildings across the Fort Detrick campus.

One morning in early January, Amar Klar sat down at his computer and found an e-mail with a curious message from a colleague. While reading a bestselling novel, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, his colleague, a professor at Princeton University, found a description of research on yeast genetics that was surprisingly similar to Klar’s early research. Even the laboratory in the novel was reminiscent of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Klar had conducted his research.