Eric Lander Interview (page: 3 / 9) Founding Director, Broad Institute	Print Interview

It's fun to read a brief bio of you, because for all the world it looks like it's a typo. We go from, "Ph.D. in math, taught managerial economics at the Harvard Business School..."

Eric Lander: Then it switches to molecular biology.

"Oh! Obviously they made a mistake. That must be somebody else's bio." We're glad to hear the story directly from you, because it finally makes sense.

Eric Lander: Well, as much as any of these do make sense.

We talked to John Gearhart recently. He started out studying apples and pears and ended up in gynecology. He had no idea he was going to be in stem cell tissue research. Is there a message there for kids?

Eric Lander: It's a crucial message for kids. In my case, after I began to pick up biology, I still wasn't really clear what I was going to do with it. I was despairing for several years of having thrown away a great career in mathematics. Not really pursuing this thing at the business school that I had, and learning biology, and what was I going to do with it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I eventually talked the business school into letting me take a year's leave of absence, and I went down to MIT to work with some geneticists working on the nematode worm, which is a very good model of genetics, and by chance, again, one Tuesday afternoon I met David Botstein. He was a yeast geneticist who had recently come up with a brilliant idea for how to do human genetics, but what he really was lacking was a mathematical quality, because it needed a lot of mathematics to really develop it. So David and I just hit it off. We started talking. He was from the Bronx, I was from Brooklyn. We were arguing in the halls, having a great time, and one thing led to another, and I dropped everything else I was doing and began to work intensely with David on these ideas about human genetics.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I got invited -- David dragged me along -- to an international meeting in Helsinki in '85, and then he got me invited to speak at a famous meeting at Cold Spring Harbor in 1986. The meeting that year was on human genetics, and it is the scene of the famous debate on the Human Genome Project that took place. And there were all these highfalutin Nobel Laureates up on the stage expressing opinions, and then they turned to the audience, and even though I was tremendously inhibited and intimidated, I raised my hand anyway and sort of threw myself into the discussion. Remarkably, after the discussion, a couple of senior people came over and said, "Oh, do you want to come to dinner? We really liked some of the things you said," and we were chatting. And a couple of weeks later I found myself invited to participate in some meeting on the Genome Project, and a couple of months after that I found myself invited to chair some subcommittees on the Genome Project, and I quickly realized that there were no experts on this subject, and I could pass for an expert on this and that was just fine. So all told I was still very worried about it. I asked Botstein, "What am I going to do to ever get a job in this?" I was still teaching in the business school at the time, while I was moonlighting doing all this, and I said, "I don't look like a standard issue molecular biologist. Who's ever going to give me a job?" David said, "You've got it all backwards. It's the guys who look like standard issue molecular biologists who have a problem. They all look the same. You look different. Any place would be glad to have one of you. Maybe not two, but glad to have one of you."

And he was so right, because...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The way it shook out, by 1988 or so, was here I had this training in genetics. I had training in mathematics that was turning out to be tremendously important for all this genome stuff. I had a background in business, from having taught at a business school, at a time that biology was organizing its first large scale project that required organizational thinking. And I had a bunch of experience from journalism writing, at a time when expressing what this project was about and formulating it was tremendously important. So I suddenly had a recipe for a whole bunch of skills here that fell together, and I'd love to take credit for having planned it that way, but it wasn't that way at all. It was completely by accident. And I found, within a year or so after that, I had an offer of tenured positions teaching at both Harvard and MIT in biology. A year after that, I launched one of the first Human Genome Centers in the United States. A year or two after that, I helped co-found a biopharmaceutical firm, and onward like that, but it was very much an accident. Even as recently as two years ago, when I got elected to the National Academy of Sciences, around age 40 or so, I found myself rather surprised and stunned to be taken seriously at all this stuff. Because I still viewed myself -- as I still sort of do view myself -- as an accidental interloper in all this, who just stumbled upon this field, but a very lucky field to stumble upon, and some very wonderful people to guide me along the way.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

Timing can play a big role in any career. In your case, it seems like the timing was unbelievable.

Eric Lander: Genomics didn't exist at the time that I came down to MIT and met David Botstein. The few beginning seedlings were beginning to come up, and I found myself bumping into one of the people who knew a lot about it, and within 12 months of that point the Genome Project was breaking on the world scene. The timing couldn't have been better. I had nothing whatsoever to do with the timing -- it was dumb luck -- but somehow managed to take the opportunity and run with it.

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