With a gift of $100 million from billionaire philanthropist Paul G. Allen, scientists will embark on an effort to understand how cells work and how they malfunction in disease. Leaders of this new endeavor announced the launch of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Cell Science today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in Philadelphia.

Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Paul Allen plans to pump US$100 million into investigating the most basic unit of life — the cell.

We have not been seeing cells as they really are, says Rick Horwitz, and it is time for that to change.

Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen is donating $100 million of his fortune to launch what he calls an “industrial-scale” effort to understand the basic building block of all living things: the cell.

Paul Allen’s new cell-science institute will share more than a building with the brain-research center the Microsoft mogul established in his hometown 11 years ago.

Paul Allen is again dolling out a huge chunk of money to fuel scientific research.

Science - Eleven years after he established an institute dedicated to mapping the brain, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is announcing a sequel: the Allen Institute for Cell Science. Just like its predecessor, the new institute will be seeded with $100 million from Allen himself; will embrace big-team science, bringing together cell biologists, mathematicians, computational biologists, and other specialists; and will seek to decipher a world whose complexity is still largely uncharted.

Discover Magazine - Scientists imaged more than 1,700 mouse brains to build the most comprehensive mammalian brain map yet.

NPR - Patterns of gene expression in human and mouse brains suggest that cells known as glial cells may have helped us evolve brains that can acquire language and solve complex problems.