From an early age, Eric Lander made a name for himself as a mathematical prodigy, winning the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Class valedictorian at Princeton, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he was poised for a career as a theoretical mathematician. Yet he was dissatisfied. He wanted his research to serve a more immediate human purpose. He embarked on a career teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School; although he loved the teaching, he found the research unsatisfying. In the midst of a promising career, with a growing family to support, he dropped everything and made a mid-life course correction. Although he was already a professor in the business school, he undertook basic studies in biology. He soon found a new application of his mathematical prowess in the emerging field of genomics, the study of all the genes in a given organism, and their function in sickness and in health. He played a leading role in the Human Genome Project, and is the first listed author on the article describing the complete human genome published in Nature in 2001. Today, he is Founding Director of the Broad Institute, a joint project of Harvard, MIT and the Whitehead Institute, where he is leading a revolution in our understanding of the nature of life -- and the causes and treatment of disease.
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