Lander '78 leads genomics research

When Eric Lander '78 graduated from Princeton with a degree in mathematics, he still believed in learning for its own sake. But after finishing his doctorate at Oxford and completing a brief stint teaching economics at Harvard Business School, Lander found more practical applications for his talents in the somewhat unlikely field of genetics.

"I picked up most of what I know [about biology] on street corners," Lander said. "But there are some pretty good street corners around here."

Now director of the Whitehead Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Mass., Lander spent years as one of the principal scientists on the project of sequencing the human genome.

He continues to make progress on the medical frontier by cataloguing human genetic variations and correlating them to susceptibility to particular diseases — including heart disease, diabetes and cancer. By identifying which genes cause these diseases, he hopes that modern science will ultimately be able to prevent them.

Despite being on the forefront of modern genetics, however, Lander did not begin taking biology courses until he was already teaching at Harvard. His particular interest in genetics developed even later when he met David Botstein, now director of Princeton's Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, in 1985.

"The genome is big enough ... that there's a real mathematical problem in figuring out how to use this system," Botstein said. "I was sort of running around talking to people about who might help with the math of that problem."

He found the right match in Lander. Over the "next few weeks of nonstop work," Lander and Botstein formulated the framework for sequencing that has since developed into the Human Genome Project.

Currently, Lander is continuing his research at the Broad Institute, an umbrella research organization of the Whitehead Institute, MIT and Harvard, including its affiliated hospitals. By comparing genetic variation between humans and chimpanzees, dogs, mice and other humans, he hopes to be able to predict which genes will predispose a person to certain diseases.

"Evolution lovingly preserves five percent of the human genome, but only one percent of the human genome encodes proteins," Lander said. "According to the textbook picture, the protein coding region is supposed to be the majority of what matters."

Identifying the source of disease is a necessary step toward finding a cure, but Lander admitted that until that cure is found, geneticists may find themselves in an uncomfortable position. They may know with certainty that a person will suffer from a disease but nonetheless be unable to treat him or her.

But he compared this discomfort to the time between the first theoretical understanding of germs and the much later development of antibiotics. Germ theory may have been scary, but before then, doctors lacked basic information about treating infections.

Similarly, "in the 20th century, we've been trying to treat disease without knowing what's wrong on the molecular level," he said. "The work of this generation is to lay bare the molecular basis of disease."

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Lander suggested thinking about medical advances as spanning multiple generations.

"If one thinks about the impact on one's children's children, these things pay off extremely well," he said. "When their grandchildren reach adulthood, cancer will no longer be an issue. That's got to be the social time-frame we invest in."

Either way, it is an exciting time to be a scientist, Lander said.

"Students love this because it means that their elders, the previous generation, totally missed the boat," he said. "Isn't that fun when you realize there's so much more to be discovered?"

Lander still uses the math he learned in his genetics work, but he has taken other lessons away from Princeton too.

"Princeton was a tremendously formative period of my life," Lander said. "I realize in retrospect what the real value of a liberal education is."

He especially noted John McPhee's Literature of Fact class as fundamental in developing his writing skills.

A former writer for The Daily Princetonian, Lander left his mark at the University. He started the newspaper's opinion poll before graduating and later served on the Board of Trustees for a number of years.

Before college, he said, "I was a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y., and had never been exposed to a world like Princeton, both ranging from the beautiful environment to just the wide range of possibilities in the world. I'm a real Princeton loyalist."

Lander now lives in Cambridge with two sons and a daughter. He and Botstein — who is his daughter's godfather — are still in touch.