Collaboration across both disciplines and schools has been a common theme in Summers’ speeches, as has been making the Boston area a mecca for biomedical research.
He has argued for the need for more “big science”—large-scale, well-funded ventures such as what the Broad Institute will become.
And the Broad Institute will have a focus on computational biology—a Summers favorite.
At the same time, the Broad Institute will have substantially less FAS than HMS involvement, at least at the outset, Landers and others said. As a result, it remains to be seen whether the institute will do much to break down barriers Summers has said exists between the two Harvard schools.
Stuart Schreiber, chair of FAS’ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, will become one of the founding faculty members at the Broad Institute, and will bring with him the resources of the Initiative for Chemical Genetics which he leads. But besides Schreiber, no other FAS faculty are formally involved in the institute as of yet.
Lander said that the disparity was a matter of numbers—with thousands of professors involved in biomedical enterprise, HMS professors would be expected to be more represented than those from the smaller FAS science departments.
But some FAS scientists said they were skeptical of the institute and the process by which it came about.
“The overall sense in my department [Molecular and Cellular Biology] is that very little opinion was recruited from the people whose expertise is in this area,” said Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Markus Meister. “It seemed like a lot of secret negotiations were going on before anything scientific was discussed with the Faculty.”
And when Lander, who spearheaded the proposal for the institute, finally met with a group of scientists including some from FAS, he was not well received, Meister said. “There was no detail [to the proposal]—a lot of hype and buzzwords,” he said. “This is where many of my colleagues lost it.”
More generally, Meister and others point to a fault line dividing those who support “big science” from those leading smaller, one-or-two professor labs. “There’s some concern that a lot of attention would be diverted to multi-million dollar projects while there is penny-pinching at the level of smaller projects,” Meister said.
Meister said that it seems like Lander’s initial proposal, which he said was for $750 million, had been “whittled down to something more modest...and better motivated.”
Schreiber said that the plans for the Broad Institute haven’t changed dramatically since they were first proposed.
Summers and Provost Steven E. Hyman said after the press conference that they had been as consultative as circumstances allowed, and that a variety of ad-hoc groups had discussed the Broad plan.
But Schreiber agreed 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.”
While Schreiber dismisses the label “big science”—he said he “cringed” when MIT President Charles M. Vest used the word—he agrees that there is a divide among those interested in “bigger science” and those not.
But funds for the Broad Institute shouldn’t be seen as a threat to those running smaller labs, he said. “There’s room for 10-20 percent of the budget to be going for these bigger collaborative enterprises.”
—Stephen M. Marks contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.