Francis Crick Institute's £700m building 'too noisy to concentrate'

Some of the 1,250 people working at the year-old laboratory say its open plan layout, designed to produce collaboration, makes it hard to focus on work

It is a 700m cathedral to biomedical science, where scientists work together to make breakthroughs in cancer, neuroscience, pandemics and genetics. But the Francis Crick Institute is not proving to be the easiest place to concentrate.

A year after opening, some of the 1,250 people working at the Crick Institute, in its central London laboratory, have complained that the open plan design, intended to assist informal collaboration, means some areas set aside for thinking and writing up research are too noisy.