That’s Life

"HOW much do I have to pay you for a cloned liver?” That was the question posed to Linda Conlon, chief executive of Newcastle’s Centre for Life, during a recent business trip to China. While she was appalled – “this guy had clearly got the wrong end of the stick about what we do” – at least it showed that the fame of the North-East’s life science research centre has spread right around the world.

In fact, in the ten years that have passed since a semi-derelict corner of Newcastle, next to the city’s main railway station, was given a £90m make-over, the Centre for Life has become a model for what can be achieved from a standing start.

“People flock here from all over the world to look at this model and how it evolved,” says Ms Conlon, a Tynesider, who was in at the planning stage in the mid-Nineties, when she was a director with the now-defunct Tyne and Wear Development Corporation.

“It was a highly unusual experiment, bringing together very different disciplines in one place. I don’t think there is anything quite like the Centre for Life anywhere else in the world.”

In the first decade since it opened, the Centre for Life has become a true science village, complete with a pub.

At its core is the close collaboration between Newcastle University and the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

The principle behind the centre – which has produced a string of world scientific firsts, including the cloning of the world’s first human embryo – is cross-fertilisation.

Putting researchers and hands-on doctors alongside each other in the same centre has led to the rapid application of cutting-edge science.

Ms Conlon points to the groundbreaking use of stem cells to restore the sight of 38-year-old Russell Turnbull, from Consett, County Durham, last year, who lost much of the sight in his right eye after he had ammonia sprayed at him.

While the full fruits of advances in stem cell know-how is probably still years away, this new approach is already healing the sick.

Eye surgeons and scientists from the North- East England Stem Cell Institute took stem cells from his good eye and grew them in a lab at the Centre for Life.

They were then implanted in the damaged eye, where they began to function as normal.

Made possible by National Lottery funds to mark the turn of the new century, the Centre for Life would not exist if it hadn’t been for intensive lobbying.

“The person who deserves the most credit for making the Centre for Life happen is Alastair Balls,” says Ms Conlon.

Mr Balls, still chairman of the centre, was chief executive of the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation in the Nineties when he persuaded the Millennium Commission that Newcastle would be a great place for a new, outward-looking life science centre, accessible to the public.

“Sir John Hall, who was on the national Millennium Commission, also helped behind the scenes. He was determined that Newcastle was going to have a big millennium project,” says Ms Conlon.

But she points out that it was the existence of a community of talented clinicians and scientists on Tyneside at the time which helped the Millennium Commission make up its mind.

That pool of talent, since greatly strengthened by experts recruited from all over the globe, helped made the centre the runaway success it has become in only ten years.

“What Newcastle had was a very high rating in areas like genetics and life science,” says Ms Conlon. “It was building on that. We had one of the best medical schools in the country and our hospitals were top of the league.”

Built on the site of Newcastle’s first infirmary for infectious diseases, builders had to remove 1,000 bodies from the hospital’s former graveyard before construction could begin.

The end product, a striking modern complex designed by Newcastle-born architect Sir Terry Farrell, has become a symbol of the regeneration of the North-East.

Because of its multiple functions as a research centre, treatment centre, science exhibition space and classroom, the Centre for Life is the destination for scientists, patients and thousands of students, who get the chance to work in the science labs.

And because the centre leases part of its site to a bar and a nightclub, it is also visited by revellers late into the night.

BIZARRELY, as well as from hosting a skating rink in the winter, the centre’s Times Square has also become a regular venue for a marquee housing the transvestite cabaret show, the Ladyboys of Bangkok.

But at its heart is science. From a small team based at the university’s genetics department, the Institute of Human Genetics based at the centre now has 33 principal investigators, including 17 professors.

The quality of the research is ranked third in the UK, after Cambridge and Oxford universities.

The main areas of research include cancer genetics, cardiovascular genetics, complex diseases, human embryology, neuromuscular genetics, renal genetics and stem cell biology.

The centre is also home to the Northern Genetics Service and the Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life, which has helped with the birth of 3,000 babies.

“One of the things I am most proud of,” says Ms Conlon, “is that this project represents a new future for a region which was famous for industries like shipbuilding and coalmining. It will be wonderful if we can get ourselves recognised as a major world player in life sciences.”

■ A series of public events to mark the tenth anniversary of the Centre for Life is taking place throughout the year. For more information, go to life.org.uk