Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, has had a very weird career:
At first, though, it looked as if the young mathematician would follow a traditional academic path. He went to Princeton, majoring in mathematics but also indulging a passion for writing. He took a course in narrative nonfiction with the author John McPhee and wrote for the campus newspaper.
He graduated as valedictorian at age 20, won a Rhodes scholarship, went to Oxford and earned a mathematics Ph.D. there in record time — two years. Yet he was unsettled by the idea of spending the rest of his life as a mathematician.
“I began to appreciate that the career of mathematics is rather monastic,” Dr. Lander said. “Even though mathematics was beautiful and I loved it, I wasn’t a very good monk.” He craved a more social environment, more interactions.
“I found an old professor of mine and said, ‘What can I do that makes some use of my talents?’ ” He ended up at Harvard Business School, teaching managerial economics.
He had never studied the subject, he confesses, but taught himself as he went along. “I learned it faster than the students did,” Dr. Lander said.
Yet at 23, he was growing restless, craving something more challenging. Managerial economics, he recalled, “wasn’t deep enough.”
He spoke to his brother, Arthur, a neurobiologist, who sent him mathematical models of how the cerebellum worked. The models “seemed hokey,” Dr. Lander said, “but the brain was interesting.”
His appetite for biology whetted, he began hanging around a fruit-fly genetics lab at Harvard. A few years later, he talked the business school into giving him a leave of absence.
He told Harvard he would go to M.I.T., probably to learn about artificial intelligence. Instead, he ended up spending his time in Robert Horvitz’s worm genetics lab. And that led to the spark that changed his life.
It was 1983, and while Dr. Lander was hanging around the worm lab, Dr. Botstein, at the time a professor at M.I.T., was growing increasingly frustrated. He had spent five fruitless years looking for someone who knew mathematics to take on a project involving traits like high blood pressure that were associated with multiple genes. For these diseases, the old techniques for finding traits caused by single genes would not work.
“I literally went around looking for someone who could help,” Dr. Botstein said. Finally, at a conference, another biologist said, “There’s this fellow, Lander, at Harvard Business School who wanted to do something with biology.”
Dr. Botstein hunted Dr. Lander down at a seminar at M.I.T., and pounced. The two connected immediately. “We went to a whiteboard,” Dr. Lander said, “and started arguing.”
Within a week, Dr. Lander had solved the problem. Then the two researchers invented a computer algorithm to analyze maps of genes in minutes instead of months. Soon, Dr. Lander had immersed himself in problems of mapping human disease genes.
I know nothing of this chap, and have deliberately not found out anything before saying that this CV reads like one of somebody who is not motivated to do good scientific work.
He sounds smart but unprincipled — which absolutely and permanently would rule him out from significant academic work.
I am not at all impressed; indeed people like this guy seems to be have infiltrated everywhere and destroyed all possibility of good work in many fields — I’m sick of them.
This may well be an impression created by the interview, or by the journalist — but it is the definite impression. A CV phrased like this should set off alarm bells, not evoke approval…