Main Text
Hi, I’m Mark Daly, and you may remember me from previous award introductory talks. If so, by now you might be wondering why I haven’t accomplished more, given the outstanding company I’ve been privileged to keep. I have, for quite some time, imagined what I would say if I were privileged enough to introduce this year’s Allan award recipient (and of course the question was not whether Eric Lander would someday win it, but simply whether I would be the one fortunate enough to do the introductory talk!). I have to say, now that the moment is here, I find that any words I would say are really not adequate to capture the full breadth and significance of his contributions.
Contrary to some rumors, I was, in fact, of the consenting age of 18 when I first took a summer internship in Eric’s nascent lab at the Whitehead Institute in 1986… Stop counting…. Almost without significant break, I have had a front row seat to watch the most brilliant individual most of us will ever know carve a career track, the impact of which none of us could have remotely imagined in those early days.
Some of you may not really know Eric the mathematician, who, while teaching at Harvard Business School in the 1980s, became intrigued with genetics, the mathematical elegance of inheritance, and its importance and potential for medicine that attract so many of us. And that he began a partnership with David Botstein to develop methods of using human genetic markers to discover disease genes. His career switch to mammalian genetics, taking a fellow position at the Whitehead Institute under David Baltimore, led to an explosion of productive, creative, elegant and, most importantly, practical mathematics, resulting in numerous foundational works such as the Lander-Green algorithm that underpins the next decades of genetic linkage analysis, the first genetic linkage maps of human and mouse, numerous methods for mapping disease genes, and, notably, the Lander-Waterman statistics that lay the mathematical foundation for the physical mapping and sequencing of the human genome. This set of contributions alone could warrant this award when you assess what has come from them.
More of you are aware that, despite no formal experimental training in biology, Eric was not simply content to advise on the theoretical design of the genome project but jumped in with full force to build from scratch a production sequencing center that would go on to make the largest contribution to the Human Genome Project, as well as lead the analysis and interpretation of the human and mouse genomes. This work, as well as his outspoken and unswerving leadership on the importance of the sequence, tools, and methods being in the public domain, are, as David Baltimore describes, one of the great contributions to modern science. But for Eric, his seminal contributions to the field of genomics were simply the next logical steps toward the understanding of the inherited nature of disease.
Taking those next steps, Eric diversified the scope of his and his center’s research. On one hand, he supported foundational work in characterizing genetic variation and its patterns and drove the launch of the natural “genetics” successors to the Genome Project, HapMap and 1000 Genomes—thus setting us on the path to the GWAS era that we continue to reap the benefits of today and see the fruits of at this meeting—and, I must add, he handed the reins to many of us to exercise leadership in such projects at early stages of our careers.
Simultaneously, he began to dive more deeply in to the biology of the genome and continued the swift development of genomics as a field, first with dramatic insights about the importance of non-coding DNA through comparative genomics (as Francis Collins recalls, Eric often described it as “reading evolution’s lab notebook”), and then through innovative uses of sequencing as a readout of novel experimental approaches that identified and systematized our understanding of non-coding RNAs, histone modifications, and long-range interactions between chromosomal regions.
I lack the time to acknowledge so many of his other contributions to cancer genomics, to building scientific community, to evolving a genome center into the visionary and unique Broad Institute—which partners with top universities and hospitals in Boston to attack medical problems directly with genetics and genomics research—to advising about national science in the US, where he co-chaired the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) with President Obama, and so much more.
David Baltimore summarized elegantly: Eric is everything—a great thinker, a great organizer, a great motivator, and a great speaker. He puts all of these talents at the service of reaching scientific goals and, in my own opinion, has done more than anyone of his generation to move the elegant mathematics of inheritance into a durable impact on biology and medicine. It is my true honor to welcome this year’s winner of the William Allan Award, Eric Lander.