Eric Lander Interview (page: 2 / 9) Founding Director, Broad Institute	Print Interview

You say it was an accident that led you to Harvard Business School. Can you talk about that accident?

Eric Lander: Sure. Well, in one sense my own career sounds very linear and straightforward. I was a math whiz in high school. I was a math major in college. I went on a Rhodes scholarship, to do a math Ph.D. A very linear chain. But in point of fact there were wonderful distractions all along the way. When I was in college, my very first week, I came back from a play, stopped in at a beer and pretzel party at the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian at Princeton, had a wonderful time and stayed for four years doing journalism. I loved writing. I worked on the newspaper just a vast majority of my time in college. I took a great course from John McPhee, a spectacular nonfiction writer. I was a stringer for Business Week magazine over the summer on an internship. I just really loved it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the things I did was I decided to start a public opinion poll in 1976 for the presidential election. George Gallup's organization is located in Princeton, and I got up the courage to go across the street and convince the Gallup organization to help us start a student poll, which we did. We involved a number of colleges up and down the East Coast, and launched a public opinion poll. That got me talking to a bunch of economics professors and political science professors and statisticians, and I just made some friends there, even though I was a math major doing other things. When it finally came to pass that I got into graduate school, and I didn't quite know what I wanted to do, it seemed to me that all this, economics and worldly things, would be useful. It was something I ought to think about doing, so I went back and I saw them. I didn't go back and see my math professors. I went back and saw people like Ed Tufte, a political scientist and statistician, and he pointed me to a few people in Boston. And they pointed me to the Harvard Business School, saying that was a place that would take an itinerant mathematician with good credentials, who didn't necessarily know anything about economics, and would let them learn on the job. And sure enough, I don't quite know why they did, so they gave me a position teaching managerial economics, and I didn't know a thing about managerial economics but neither did the students. I was okay, and I learned faster than they did so it worked out just fine.

In fact, I became an exceedingly popular teacher, and I just threw myself into the teaching and the work, but after a year or two, I realized that while I enjoyed the teaching tremendously, the research component -- the sort of serious research that I had been doing -- I still felt was missing in my life, and I had no clue what I wanted to do.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One summer I was finishing up a book, coming out of my thesis on a very abstract subject -- algebraic combinatorics for goodness sakes! -- and I didn't know what to do, so I spoke to my brother. My brother was a development neurobiologist and was going through graduate school, and Arthur suggested to me, "You're a mathematician. You know all about information theory. You should learn about the brain. The brain is a really great place to apply it." So being hopelessly naive, I said, "Okay, I'll learn neurobiology this summer." I got a couple of books and papers and things on mathematical aspects of neurobiology. They were interesting, but they didn't ring very true, and I, in any case, decided I had to learn more neurobiology. So I started learning about neurobiology, wet lab neurobiology. I decided in order to do that I needed to know more biology, so I decided, okay, next semester I'd learn biology.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I sat in on a biology course. I took the laboratory component of it, freaking out the poor graduate student who has this business school professor sitting in on his course. But he was kind enough to take me back to his lab and introduce me to his own advisor, and Peter and Lucy Cherbas gave me a bench in their laboratory and taught me how to clone genes. So I moonlighted cloning genes in their lab for a couple of years, figuring that genetics was the most rigorous place to start, figuring I'd work my way back up to the brain. That's how I became a biologist. I became a biologist very much through that suggestion of my brother's, and through this lucky series of accidents, and stumbling upon people who were kind enough to take me, and then picking up biology on street corners -- admittedly very good street corners -- in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But largely, most of my biology education came while I was teaching as professor of managerial economics at Harvard Business School.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

It's never too late.

Eric Lander: It's never too late. It leaves me singularly unqualified to advise my students on how they should run their careers, because they certainly think that this is a crazy way to do things, and I occasionally have to remind them that these crazy ways to do things are about the only ways that really in the end turn out satisfying.

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