Harvard, MIT and the Cambridge-based Whitehead Institute announced last Thursday a sweeping new biomedical research center aimed at harnessing the recently-revealed code of the human genome for clinical ends.

A $100 million gift from California philanthropists Eli and Edythe L. Broad will bring together researchers across the two universities, in what founders described as an unprecedented collaboration. The new Broad Institute will grow out of Whitehead’s programs, under the leadership of Eric S. Lander, a faculty member at both MIT and Whitehead and a key player in the completed Human Genome Project (HGP).

MIT will administer the institute, but the three institutions will oversee it jointly. MIT and Harvard have committed to raising $100 million each to support its research, and founders hope that with federal grants, the center will grow to be a more-than half billion dollar enterprise.

The announcement of the institute—which came after the Harvard Corporation approved the University’s involvement at its Commencement week meeting—brings to fruition the first of a number of initiatives in the life sciences that University President Lawrence H. Summers has been promoting for over a year.

But the reaction—including some professors’ criticism of the institute and the process by which it was formed—also underscores some of the political and institutional challenges Summers will face in his efforts to strengthen research into the life sciences.

At a press conference Thursday, top officials from the universities and Whitehead promoted the new institute as bringing a focus—and a new model of inquiry—to the first great scientific challenge of the century.

The Broad Institute hopes to leverage its large size to its advantage, mining vast amounts of genetic data in the hopes of finding useful medical applications.

With the full human genome sequenced, research at the institute will attempt to use the data to better understand and treat the cellular mechanisms underlying disease, rather than just its symptoms, Lander explained.

“I have kids. I’m hoping by the time they grow up and need medical attention that...they will be able to have access to a medicine based on actual causes,” Lander said.

As was the case with the HGP, a key philosophy behind the institute’s work is to make the tools it develops widely available to scientists worldwide.

“Our collective scientific judgment was that in a world such as ours...fundamental research and fundamental capabilities should be in the hands of all types of scientists,” Lander said.

Lander and others emphasized that the institute will be the first of its kind in terms of the scope of the collaborations it hopes to promote.

Among its founding faculty are professors from MIT, Whitehead, the Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS) and Harvard Medical School (HMS). It will bring together basic, applied and clinical scientists, with experts from fields including computational biology, chemistry and engineering.

HMS faculty at Harvard’s affiliated teaching hospitals—who, according to Lander, provided the push behind the University’s involvement in the institute—will be particularly important contributors, bringing with them crucial clinical data.

While outsiders were more skeptical of Lander and others’ claim that the center is without precedent, they agreed it would be among an elite group.