Such a large commitment of resources will inevitably affect other research, Maniatis said.

“There’s not an infinite amount of resources—it can’t help but affect alternative directions,” he said.

Stuart Schreiber, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the lone FAS professor among the group of founding associates of the institute, said that funds for the Broad Institute shouldn’t be seen as a threat to those running smaller labs.

“There’s room for 10-20 percent of the budget to be going for these bigger collaborative enterprises,” Schreiber said.

A spokesperson for Summers said that Summers believes the University must have a research portfolio balanced between large-scale collaborative projects and “individual investigator science.”

While Schreiber dismisses the label “big science”—he said he “cringed” when Vest used the word to describe the institute—he agrees that there is a divide among those interested in “bigger science” and those not.

And Schreiber acknowledged that many FAS scientists remain to be won over to the institute. Some biologists aren’t as oriented toward research with medical ends, while others don’t see its benefit, he said.

“[The institute’s reception] really varies from person to person; its very area dependent,” Schreiber said. “At the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences and my department you see a lot of support. Those [areas] tend to be more entrepreneurial.”

Some professors said that they took comfort in the fact that the plan for the institute seemed to have been scaled down from the proposal they had initially heard. Several said that the original proposal was in the $750 million range.

Meister said that it seems like Lander’s initial and more ambitious proposal had been “whittled down to something more modest...and better motivated.”

But officials from Harvard said that the size of institute had fluctuated considerably, and Schreiber said the proposal was essentially the same as what Lander originally floated.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.