Harvard Joins New Genome Center

Harvard, MIT and the Cambridge-based Whitehead Institute announced last Thursday a sweeping new biomedical research center aimed at harnessing the recently-revealed code of the human genome for clinical ends.

A $100 million gift from California philanthropists Eli and Edythe L. Broad will bring together researchers across the two universities, in what founders described as an unprecedented collaboration. The new Broad Institute will grow out of Whitehead’s programs, under the leadership of Eric S. Lander, a faculty member at both MIT and Whitehead and a key player in the completed Human Genome Project (HGP).

MIT will administer the institute, but the three institutions will oversee it jointly. MIT and Harvard have committed to raising $100 million each to support its research, and founders hope that with federal grants, the center will grow to be a more-than half billion dollar enterprise.

The announcement of the institute—which came after the Harvard Corporation approved the University’s involvement at its Commencement week meeting—brings to fruition the first of a number of initiatives in the life sciences that University President Lawrence H. Summers has been promoting for over a year.

But the reaction—including some professors’ criticism of the institute and the process by which it was formed—also underscores some of the political and institutional challenges Summers will face in his efforts to strengthen research into the life sciences.

At a press conference Thursday, top officials from the universities and Whitehead promoted the new institute as bringing a focus—and a new model of inquiry—to the first great scientific challenge of the century.

The Broad Institute hopes to leverage its large size to its advantage, mining vast amounts of genetic data in the hopes of finding useful medical applications.

With the full human genome sequenced, research at the institute will attempt to use the data to better understand and treat the cellular mechanisms underlying disease, rather than just its symptoms, Lander explained.

“I have kids. I’m hoping by the time they grow up and need medical attention that...they will be able to have access to a medicine based on actual causes,” Lander said.

As was the case with the HGP, a key philosophy behind the institute’s work is to make the tools it develops widely available to scientists worldwide.

“Our collective scientific judgment was that in a world such as ours...fundamental research and fundamental capabilities should be in the hands of all types of scientists,” Lander said.

Lander and others emphasized that the institute will be the first of its kind in terms of the scope of the collaborations it hopes to promote.

Among its founding faculty are professors from MIT, Whitehead, the Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) and Harvard Medical School (HMS). It will bring together basic, applied and clinical scientists, with experts from fields including computational biology, chemistry and engineering.

HMS faculty at Harvard’s affiliated teaching hospitals—who, according to Lander, provided the push behind the University’s involvement in the institute—will be particularly important contributors, bringing with them crucial clinical data.

While outsiders were more skeptical of Lander and others’ claim that the center is without precedent, they agreed it would be among an elite group.

Harold E. Varmus, former director of the National Institute of Health, said that there were other similar efforts, including Stanford’s “Bio-X” interdisciplinary science center, but that the Broad collaboration was a powerful one.

“It is among the few [centers] to respond to the emerging need for multi-disciplinary approaches to biomedical sciences,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Summers said that the strength of the Broad Institute will be its parent institutions.

“I am convinced that there is no other city in the world with as many extraordinary scientists at every level...prepared to work on biomedical problems,” Summers said.

The Broad Institute will be located near Whitehead and MIT in Cambridge’s Kendall Square neighborhood, an area seeded with biotechnology firms. The institute will have 15 associated faculty members when it is launched later this year, and Lander will be appointed to the HMS faculty at that time.

Lander and the institute faculty will develop its research priorities, but will ultimately report to an executive committee consisting of Summers, MIT President Charles M. Vest and Eli Broad, who is currently chair of financial services giant AIG SunAmerica.

Having a donor on the top oversight committee is unusual for an academic institution, but more acceptable in the world of private foundations such as Whitehead, Harvard officials said.

From the Top Down

Summers has said that strengthening life science research at the University is one of his top priorities, and the institute embodies a number of goals he has promoted to that end.

Collaboration across both disciplines and schools has been a common theme in Summers’ speeches, as has been making the Boston area a mecca for biomedical research.

He has argued for the need for more “big science”—large-scale, well-funded ventures such as what the Broad Institute will become.

And the Broad Institute will have a focus on computational biology—a Summers favorite.

According to those involved in planning for further life science initiatives, the institute is a major commitment for Harvard but is only part of the overall effort. It will be a small part of a planned University-wide life science campaign, said HMS Executive Dean Eric P. Buehrens.

Summers said his office expects to announce progress on other initiatives this year.

But some professors from FAS said that the institute raises worries about these future efforts. Several criticized what they saw as a lack of consultation about Lander’s proposal for the Broad Institute.

While FAS will be, at least at the outset, less involved in the Broad Institute than HMS, these scientists said they would have expected to play a role in considering a commitment of the magnitude required by the institute.

“The overall sense in my department [Molecular and Cellular Biology] is that very little opinion was recruited from the people whose expertise is in this area,” said Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Markus Meister. “It seemed like a lot of secret negotiations were going on before anything scientific was discussed with the Faculty.”

Meister and others said they were frustrated to learn of the proposal, pushed by Lander as early as a year and a half ago, from colleagues at other schools.

“Essentially all FAS faculty were either ignorant or misinformed,” said Professor of Physics Daniel S. Fisher.

According to Fisher, two committees that were supposed to review the proposal—a University-wide committee on computational biology and a committee convened specifically about this project—were kept almost entirely in the dark and did not meet on the proposal more than a couple of times.

And when Lander did meet with a group of scientists including some from FAS, he was not well received.

“There was no detail [to the proposal]—a lot of hype and buzzwords,” Meister said. “This is where many of my colleagues lost it.”

Lee Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Thomas P. Maniatis criticized the heavy-handed approach of the central administration.

“The decision was made by the president,” he said. “There was no serious consultation.”

Summers and Hyman said after the press conference that they had been as consultative as circumstances allowed, and that a variety of ad hoc groups had discussed the Broad plan.

But these FAS scientists said that they continue to have questions about aspects of the institute’s mission and the allocation of resources to it.

Maniatis said it was worrisome that the institute’s leaders were still light on specifics.

And the “big science” approach, he and others said, is one that not everyone supports.

“It’s naive to think that simply collecting large amounts of information will lead to fundamental breakthrough,” Maniatis said. “It’s not a very effective way of organizing research.”

“There’s some concern that a lot of attention would be diverted to multi-million dollar projects while there is penny-pinching at the level of smaller projects,” Meister said.

Such a large commitment of resources will inevitably affect other research, Maniatis said.

“There’s not an infinite amount of resources—it can’t help but affect alternative directions,” he said.

Stuart Schreiber, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the lone FAS professor among the group of founding associates of the institute, said that funds for the Broad Institute shouldn’t be seen as a threat to those running smaller labs.

“There’s room for 10-20 percent of the budget to be going for these bigger collaborative enterprises,” Schreiber said.

A spokesperson for Summers said that Summers believes the University must have a research portfolio balanced between large-scale collaborative projects and “individual investigator science.”

While Schreiber dismisses the label “big science”—he said he “cringed” when Vest used the word to describe the institute—he agrees that there is a divide among those interested in “bigger science” and those not.

And Schreiber acknowledged that many FAS scientists remain to be won over to the institute. Some biologists aren’t as oriented toward research with medical ends, while others don’t see its benefit, he said.

“[The institute’s reception] really varies from person to person; its very area dependent,” Schreiber said. “At the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and my department you see a lot of support. Those [areas] tend to be more entrepreneurial.”

Some professors said that they took comfort in the fact that the plan for the institute seemed to have been scaled down from the proposal they had initially heard. Several said that the original proposal was in the $750 million range.

Meister said that it seems like Lander’s initial and more ambitious proposal had been “whittled down to something more modest...and better motivated.”

But officials from Harvard said that the size of institute had fluctuated considerably, and Schreiber said the proposal was essentially the same as what Lander originally floated.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.