Eric Lander

Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957) is an American mathematician and geneticist who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.

Eric Lander is founding director emeritus of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School, graduating in 1974 as valedictorian and an International Mathematical Olympiad Silver Medalist for the U.S. At age 17, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers for which he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

After graduating from Stuyvesant High School as valedictorian in 1974, Lander graduated from Princeton University in 1978 as valedictorian and with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.

He completed his senior thesis, "On the structure of projective modules", under John Coleman Moore's supervision.

He then moved to the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar and student of Wolfson College, Oxford.

He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the University of Oxford in 1980 with a thesis on algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs supervised by Peter Cameron.

During his career, Lander has worked on human genetic variation, human population history, genome evolution, non-coding RNAs, three-dimensional folding of the human genome and genome-wide association studies to discover the genes essential for biological processes using CRISPR-based editing.

As a mathematician, Lander studied combinatorics and applications of representation theory to coding theory.

He enjoyed mathematics but did not wish to spend his life in such a "monastic" career.

Unsure what to do next, he took a job teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School.

At the suggestion of his brother, developmental biologist Arthur Lander, he started to look at neurobiology, saying at the time, "because there's a lot of information in the brain".

To understand mathematical neurobiology, he felt he had to study cellular neurobiology; this, in turn, led to studying microbiology and eventually genetics.

"When I finally feel I have learned genetics, I should get back to these other problems. But I'm still trying to get the genetics right", Lander said.

Lander later became acquainted with David Botstein, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Botstein was working on a way to unravel how subtle differences in complex genetic systems can become disorders such as cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and even obesity.

The two collaborated to develop a computer algorithm to analyze the maps of genes.

In 1986 Lander joined the Whitehead Institute and became an assistant professor at MIT.

He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987.

In 1990, he founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR).

The WICGR became one of the world's leading centers of genome research, and under Lander's leadership made great progress in developing new methods of analyzing mammalian genomes.

It also made important breakthroughs in applying this information to the study of human genetic variation and formed the basis for the foundation of the Broad Institute—a transformation Lander spearheaded.

Two main groups attempted to sequence the human genome.

The first was the Human Genome Project, a loosely organized, publicly funded effort that intended to publish the information it obtained freely and without restrictions.

Many research groups from countries all over the world were involved in this effort.

The second was undertaken by Celera Genomics, which intended to patent the information obtained and charge subscriptions for use of the sequence data.

Established first, the Human Genome Project moved slowly in the early phases as the Department of Energy's role was unclear and sequencing technology was in its infancy.

Officially, the Human Genome Project had an eight-year head start before Celera entered the race, though discussions for the Human Genome Project began fourteen years before Celera announced their own project.

Because the Human Genome Project was a $3 billion publicly funded venture, the consortia raced to enter as much of the human genome into the public domain as quickly as possible once Celera began work in 1998.

This was a change of strategy for the Human Genome Project, because many scientists at the time wanted to establish a more complete copy of the genome, not simply publish the many fragments individually.

Lander aggressively pressured Human Genome Project scientists to work longer and faster to publish genome fragments before Celera.

Lander himself is now listed on 73 patents and patent applications related to genomics.

In February 2001, both the Human Genome Project and Celera published drafts of the human genome in the scientific journals Nature and Science, respectively.

In the Human Genome Project's Nature publication, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Center for Genome Research, was listed first, with Lander listed as the first named author.

Leveraging Celera's sequencing and analysis techniques, the Whitehead Institute also made a contribution to the sequencing of the mouse genome, an important step in fully understanding the molecular biology of mice, which are often used as model organisms in studies of everything from human diseases to embryonic development.

The WICGR has since sequenced the genomes of Ciona savignyi (sea squirt), the pufferfish, the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa, and multiple relatives of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, one of the most studied yeasts.

The Ciona savignyi genome provides a good system for exploring the evolutionary origins of all vertebrates.

Lander served as the 11th director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President in Joe Biden's presidential Cabinet.

In response to allegations that he had engaged in bullying and abusive conduct, Lander apologized and resigned from the Biden Administration effective February 18, 2022.

Lander was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Jewish parents, the son of Rhoda G. Lander, a social studies teacher, and Harold Lander, an attorney.