Eric Lander Interview (page: 4 / 9) Founding Director, Broad Institute	Print Interview

There were other changes happening just as you were becoming involved in biology. One change was the proliferation of computers in biology, and the whole concept of computational neurobiology. Twenty-five or 30 years ago that's not how people did science.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Eric Lander: Fifteen years ago computers played no significant role in biology. Biology has only become a computational discipline primarily in the last decade or so. So the time that I was getting into it as a mathematician, I was reasonably convinced that what I had done in mathematics was utterly irrelevant, and would be utterly irrelevant in the biology I did. Now biological computation -- bioinformatics -- are becoming tremendously important areas, and it's becoming very clear that a large portion of biology is going to start with the information first, to generate the hypotheses for the lab, and so the field will have undergone a dramatic transformation over this period. If I had sought really good advice when I was in school, no one would have told me to use mathematics as a way into biology. Luckily, I never sought any of that advice. It just sort of happened.

Do you have any sense of destiny at work in all this?

Eric Lander: No, not a chance. I don't think it was a sense of destiny.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think we construct our lives out of the pieces we have, and the only rules to go by are to surround yourself by wonderful people, by smart people, very decent people, and then, as the physicists say, wait for productive collisions to occur. If there are a large number of high energy collisions, then there's a large subset of productive collisions. So if you put yourself in those environments, things happen. And you take the pieces you have, which have to be the pieces you love. I didn't go into journalism with the idea that writing would turn out to be tremendously important to me as a scientist. I didn't go into studying the brain and biology with any idea of where I'd end up. You take the pieces you love, and then you fashion a life out of it, rather than looking for the pieces to fit some particular mold.

That's beautifully said. When you tell the story today there's a lot of humor and a cheery spirit, but there must have been a point when you had doubts about this jagged journey. Were there any setbacks or self-doubts along the way?

Eric Lander: Oh, it was mostly setbacks and self-doubts.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I now tell the story with a smile because it's all worked out just fine, and I look back and I laugh. But through all of these peregrinations, through different fields and random walks, I was very frequently depressed about all of it, and deeply worried about this. After all, world class math student, a Rhodes scholar, won thesis prizes in mathematics. I had a great career prospect to go ahead and do pure mathematics. I discarded all of that and I wasn't sure what for, and I recriminated often about that. I worried deeply about it, that I would never really have a good position in a university, or doing anything else for that matter. So anybody who imagines that you make these transitions without tremendous agonizing is absolutely wrong. I tell the story with a laugh today, but certainly it's a very painful thing to be searching around like that, and not knowing what you really want to do. Eventually, you make enough transitions that you realize that life is about making those transitions. I still doubt I made them very gracefully. I reckon I have a few more career changes left in me, and I don't imagine I'm going to do them completely gracefully. I hope, for the sake of my wife and my kids, I do them more gracefully than the ones I've done up to now, and worry maybe a little bit less, but you take these seriously. You throw yourself into them and they matter a lot, and somehow there's great internal turmoil as you reinvent yourself and find out what you really want to do. What you have to do is balance it with a lot of fun along the way, but I would certainly be wrong to say that the whole thing was easy. It certainly, I don't think, looks easy in retrospect, and it certainly wasn't easy. What I was very blessed by was wonderful people to do it with, and wonderful help.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

When did you get married along the way?

Eric Lander: I met my wife at university. In fact, we met in a constitutional law class. I always had an interest in law, because my parents were lawyers, and Lori and I met in a constitutional law class when we were sophomores. We got to know each other much better during our later college career. We never really dated, but we worked on a zillion projects together. And right after we graduated from college we traveled together in Asia for a couple of months, and when I went off to graduate school, we already both knew that we would get married. I actually proposed to her while I was still in graduate school, and we agreed that as soon as we were back on the same continent -- she was in law school in Florida, I had graduate school in England -- that we'd get married. And we did, so we've been married since.

So did she go through all of these twists and turns with you?

Eric Lander: She's been through all of the twists and turns in the road, and she can tell the real story of all of those things. She's wonderful. Her support through all of those things has meant so much. She jokes that I had my mid-life crisis early, and I think that's absolutely right. I think as long as I've had them already and don't have any new sets, she'll be just delighted. She was very supportive about all of these changes. I was just beginning to get interested in molecular biology. Everything I've done I've got very enthusiastic about. I would drag her to the lab late at night and show her how to do radioactive labeling of DNA and things like that with great enthusiasm, and she'd put up with it with great equanimity.

What is her field?

Eric Lander: She's a lawyer. She went to law school and became a securities litigator and also public interest. She worked for a large law firm, Skadden Arps, for a number of years. Ten or 11 years doing securities litigation, and running their pro bono program as well, and then about five years ago she left Skadden and has been home with the kids and painting. She's also an artist. She does a lot of painting. When the kids grow up, who knows?

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