Whitehead Institute
Encyclopedia
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
, USA.
The Whitehead Institute was founded as a fiscally independent entity from Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, and its members and associate members hold faculty appointments in MIT's Biology Department.
The institute is one of the world's leading centers for genomic research. Its Center for Genome Research was active in the Human Genome Project
Human Genome Project
The Human Genome Project is an international scientific research project with a primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, and of identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional...
, and reportedly contributed one-third of the human genome sequence announced in June 2000.
In June 2003, Eli and Edythe L. Broad
Eli Broad
Eli Broad is an American businessman from Detroit, Michigan who resides in Los Angeles, California.-Life and career:An only child, Broad was born in the Bronx to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents. His father was a housepainter, his mother was a dressmaker. His family moved to Detroit when he...
pledged $100 million to build the Broad Institute
Broad Institute
The Broad Institute is a genomic medicine research center located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Although it is independently governed and supported as a 501 nonprofit research organization, the institute is formally affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard...
, a joint venture of Whitehead, MIT, Harvard and local teaching hospitals. The new venture's mission is to expand tools for genomic medicine and apply them for the treatment of disease.
Whitehead has a world-renowned faculty that includes the recipients of the 1997 and 2010 National Medal of Science
National Medal of Science
The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...
(Robert Weinberg
Robert Weinberg
Robert Allan Weinberg is a Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and American Cancer Society Research Professor; his research is in the area of oncogenes and the genetic basis of human cancer. Weinberg is also affiliated with the Broad Institute and is a founding member of the...
and Susan Lindquist
Susan Lindquist
Susan Lindquist is a professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions...
, respectively); nine Members of the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
(David Bartel, Gerald Fink
Gerald Fink
Gerald Fink is an American biologist, who was Director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT from 1990-2001. He graduated from Amherst College in 1962 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965. He then taught at Cornell University where he became a Professor of Genetics. In 1982 he became a...
, Rudolf Jaenisch
Rudolf Jaenisch
Rudolf Jaenisch is a biologist at MIT. He is a pioneer of transgenic science, in which an animal’s genetic makeup is altered. Jaenisch has focused on creating transgenic mice to study cancer and neurological diseases....
, Eric Lander
Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , a member of the Whitehead Institute, and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has devoted his career toward realizing the promise of the human genome for medicine. He is co-chair of U.S...
, Susan Lindquist
Susan Lindquist
Susan Lindquist is a professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions...
, Harvey Lodish
Harvey Lodish
Harvey F. Lodish is a molecular and cell biologist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, and textbook author...
, Terry Orr-Weaver, David Page, and Weinberg); three Members of the Institute of Medicine
Institute of Medicine
The Institute of Medicine is a not-for-profit, non-governmental American organization founded in 1970, under the congressional charter of the National Academy of Sciences...
(Fink, Lander, and Weinberg); and seven Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
(Jaenisch, Fink, Lander, Lindquist, Lodish, Page and Weinberg.) All Whitehead faculty are also members of the Biology Department at MIT. Members are tenured full and associate professors; Associate Members have tenure-track appointments. Whitehead also has an Affiliate Members program.