Harvard, MIT To Spearhead Joint Biomedical Research Center

Harvard, MIT and the Cambridge-based Whitehead Institute announced 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 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. And MIT and Harvard have committed to raising as much as $200 million from individuals, foundations and corporations to support its research.

At a press conference Thursday, top officials from the universities and Whitehead said the new institute would bring a focus—and a new model of inquiry—to the first great scientific challenge of the 21st century.

With the full human genome sequenced, research at the Broad Institute will attempt to use the genetic 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 judgement 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, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (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.

University President Lawrence H. 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 donation is not an endowment: it is earmarked to directly fund research over the next decade. It is also unusual in that Eli Broad—chair of financial service giant AIG SunAmerica and a noted philanthropist who helped fund the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles—has no prior connection to MIT or Harvard.

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. Lander will be appointed to the faculty of HMS at that time.

Little Things, Big Issues

The announcement of the institute—which came after the Harvard Corporation approved the University’s involvement at its meeting Commencement week—finally brings to fruition an initiative in the life sciences that Summers has promoted for a year without revealing details.

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.

At the same time, the Broad Institute will have substantially less FAS than HMS involvement, at least at the outset, Landers and others said. As a result, it remains to be seen whether the institute will do much to break down barriers Summers has said exists between the two Harvard schools.

Stuart Schreiber, chair of FAS’ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, will become one of the founding faculty members at the Broad Institute, and will bring with him the resources of the Initiative for Chemical Genetics which he leads. But besides Schreiber, no other FAS faculty are formally involved in the institute as of yet.

Lander said that the disparity was a matter of numbers—with thousands of professors involved in biomedical enterprise, HMS professors would be expected to be more represented than those from the smaller FAS science departments.

But some FAS scientists said they were skeptical of the institute and the process by which it came about.

“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.”

And when Lander, who spearheaded the proposal for the institute, finally met with a group of scientists including some from FAS, he was not well received, Meister said. “There was no detail [to the proposal]—a lot of hype and buzzwords,” he said. “This is where many of my colleagues lost it.”

More generally, Meister and others point to a fault line dividing those who support “big science” from those leading smaller, one-or-two professor labs. “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.

Meister said that it seems like Lander’s initial proposal, which he said was for $750 million, had been “whittled down to something more modest...and better motivated.”

Schreiber said that the plans for the Broad Institute haven’t changed dramatically since they were first proposed.

Summers and Provost Steven E. 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 Schreiber agreed 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.”

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

But funds for the Broad Institute shouldn’t be seen as a threat to those running smaller labs, he said. “There’s room for 10-20 percent of the budget to be going for these bigger collaborative enterprises.”

—Stephen M. Marks contributed to the reporting of this story.

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