C&EN: TODAY'S HEADLINES - A COLLABORATIVE TRIUMVIRATE

STU BORMAN

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CORE FACULTY Lander (left) will head new institute, and Schreiber will direct its chemistry efforts.

WHITEHEAD INSTITUTE PHOTO HARVARD UNIVERSITY PHOTO

Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, a nonprofit research and educational institution affiliated with MIT, have announced a unique collaboration: the formation of a joint institute specializing in genomics, chemistry, and biomedicine. The Eli & Edythe L. Broad Institute will combine MIT and Whitehead strengths in human genome sequencing and analysis, comparative genomics, and bioengineering with Harvard expertise in chemical genomics and biomedicine.

Researchers and administrators at the three institutions had batted around the idea of a joint institute for a couple of years. For much of that time, the possibility that the concept would actually come to fruition seemed remote, given the slim history of major collaboration between the Harvard and MIT camps.

What got the plan moving off the drawing boards—and into the press conference last Thursday in Cambridge, Mass., at which the institute was announced—was a $100 million grant over 10 years from philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with code). Eli Broad is chairman of the financial services firm SunAmerica and founder and former chairman of home builder KB Home. Harvard and MIT each expect to match the Broad grant with private support, bringing the total to $300 million.

The institute is slated to begin operation later this year. It will eventually bring together 12 principal investigators and perhaps 30 associated (rotating) faculty members.

The initial core faculty will include MIT and Whitehead Institute genomics researcher Eric S. Lander, who will direct the new institute; Harvard chemistry professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator Stuart L. Schreiber; Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital geneticist David Altshuler; and Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Whitehead Institute cancer genetics specialist and HHMI associate investigator Todd R. Golub.

“The Broad Institute will draw on the leadership and scientific excellence of its founding institutions, the depth of Boston’s biomedical community, and the generosity of a visionary donor to bring together the diversity of expertise, critical mass, and organization needed to contribute to building the foundations for biology and medicine in the 21st century,” Lander said in a statement.

Chemistry may have slipped Lander’s mind in that formal statement, but Schreiber, who will spearhead chemistry research at the Broad Institute, will ensure its key role in the collaboration. Schreiber tells C&EN that the institute will represent “a new way of doing science: an interdisciplinary academic setting and a public-domain institute free of entangling intellectual property issues. Reagents and information will be made freely available to the scientific community. Industry is welcome to participate if it’s willing to engage in research having no precommitted rights to intellectual property.”

The collaboration will “model the openness of the Human Genome Project and extend it to the interface where chemistry meets genomics,” Schreiber notes. “I see all kinds of opportunities here to recruit new faculty and bring people into a research environment that will enable them to do their chemistry in a way that I think would be impossible otherwise.”

In addition, this is the first time Harvard, MIT, and Whitehead will be collaborating on such a large scale, Schreiber adds. “Since science is becoming so interdisciplinary, there’s a growing need for institutions to get together, to stop competing for the same resources, and to actually become teammates,” he says.

The Broad grant of $100 million for the new institute isn't a record breaker. For the sake of comparison, the largest-ever donation to an institution of higher learning was the $600 million grant awarded to California Institute of Technology in 2001 by Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore, his wife Betty, and their foundation.