Dr. Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Insititute and advocate of collaboration in science, was profiled in The New York Times earlier this week.
Though he received his Ph.D. from Oxford University in mathematics, Dr. Lander is now a leader in the field of genetics, and was a key contributor to the Human Genome Project. In 2009 he authored a video-article in JoVE entitled “A Method to Study the Three-Dimensional Architecture of Genomes.”
His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics, in a subfield so esoteric and specialized that even if someone gets a great result, it can be appreciated by only a few dozen people in the entire world. But he left that world behind and, with no formal training, entered another: the world of molecular biology, medicine and genomics.
As founding director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., he heads a biology empire and raises money from billionaires. He also teaches freshman biology (a course he never took) at M.I.T., advises President Obama on science and runs a lab.
Eric Lander — as a friend, Prof. David Botstein of Princeton, put it — knows how to spot and seize an opportunity when one arises. And he has another quality, says his high school friend Paul Zeitz: bravery combined with optimism.
To read the full article, click here.
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