Eric Lander Interview (page: 6 / 9) Founding Director, Broad Institute	Print Interview

You've made huge strides in the speed with which you are mapping the human genome. A couple of years ago, you were two years ahead of schedule. Where do you stand now?

Eric Lander: Well, it depends. The goal posts have been moved forward, in fact. Originally, it was thought that the sequence of the human genome wouldn't be produced until the year 2005. More recently, taking advantage of the fact that things were at least two years ahead of schedule, we just said, "Move up the goal posts to 2003." I think that is still probably pretty realistic.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There is currently a whole hullabaloo about competing to try to produce a rough draft of the human genome sequence within the next year or so, and I think that's a fine thing to go after. I think some of it has to do with competition with private industry, and all sorts of things. In point of fact, the real project is -- over the next three years or so -- to produce a high-quality sequence that can be used as the foundation stone for genetics in the next century, and I think it's certain that that will happen. Minor details of competition aside -- and claims from these groups and those groups -- it is so clear already, the tools are in place that we will have this foundation and we will have it in a publicly available way. I feel very strongly, as a member of the Genome Project, that this information should all be completely available to the general public. So at our Genome Center, we always followed a policy of data release before publication. We would put all the maps we built on our computer, on our web site, long before publication. And this policy, in fact, has been adopted rather broadly across the Genome Project. With an improvement in computer tools, we post our data every 24 hours. Whatever we have done in the last day is up on the computer the next day.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Do you have any idea how many hits you get?

Eric Lander: Oh, goodness! The last I checked we got something in the neighborhood of about 100,000 hits a week, but that was a while ago. I don't know. There's a lot of data there.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We also deposit our data into the national databases, and for many purposes it's more convenient to hit them there, but the intermediate forms of our data are on our web site. We get an awful lot of hits, because people are very interested in these data. We deposit it without intellectual property protection, no patents on it. I'm in favor of patenting things of use. I'm all in favor of patenting genes that can be used as therapeutics, but I think that biomedical research and the general public will be ill-served by patents willy-nilly on pieces of DNA here and there. I think they'll serve as a great impediment and disincentive to researchers who have to do the hard job of turning genes into therapies. So we deposit our data without any sort of patents, any sort of restrictions, and one way or the other, whatever happens in the private sector, whatever private databases are made, whatever patents are put on things, there will be a completely, totally, publicly available version of the human genome on the web in the next couple of years for anybody to download.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

There has been a lot of controversy about the release of investigator's research. Some of the scientists who are pounding away in labs feel very protective of their stuff. Where do we stand with that now?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Eric Lander: There are a number of questions involved in the release of data. When I was talking of projects that are primarily infrastructure building, like the sequencing of the human genome or building maps, there is no excuse for not releasing those data immediately, because those are data where they are tools. There is interpretation to be done, but that interpretation should be done by many people. There are also projects that require large sums of money, and they become public trusts rather than private hunting grounds, so that those data should be made available so that everyone can extract information from them. When you're talking about a research project that requires a great deal of interpretation, understanding the basis of a genetic disease, understanding a cancer, there are very good reasons not to be publicly disseminating that until one has passed peer review. There are challenges. There are mistakes that can occur along the way. If every time somebody had a good idea, and they put it on the web without any sort of peer review, or any sort of checking, you could run the risk that the general public would be deeply confused, and I think, at some level, lose its trust in research claims. So there is a process of peer review. On the other hand, we want to get information out. If there are ways to get information out and stamp it as tentative, that's a good thing. So there's a struggle between tremendous need for sharing in science, and also a need for care about anything that's an interpretation, as opposed to a raw fact.

These things will get solved. There is an amendment that was passed to a particular bill last year, that says that any scientific data produced with government funds should be released under a Freedom of Information Act request, even if it was produced at a private institution based on federal funds. This doesn't limit itself to data that has been published. It doesn't limit itself to data that has been used for federal regulations. It's a wholesale endorsement of anyone demanding data from a scientist. I don't think this serves anyone.

Is this material that has not passed peer review?

Eric Lander: This is un-peer reviewed. It could be a study-in-progress, unpublished, and unused by the government for rule making. For my own part, I'd be perfectly happy to endorse such a Freedom of Information Act requirement on data that has been peer reviewed and identified by a federal agency as used in its rule making. I think the public has a right to know what the underlying data are. I'm hopeful that the senator who put that regulation in, is in fact, coming around to that point of view. I chair a group called the Joint Steering Committee for Public Policy, and we take some pretty strong positions on things like this. I think data sharing is tremendously important. It's at the heart of the science. It's the only way that science advances. At the same time, there is an importance in protecting half-baked data -- and the data fully baked -- to get out there, because science is full of half-baked ideas, and you really don't want to see the results of people's failed cooking experiments.

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