![Power in Numbers is a simply charming profile of the incredible polymath, Dr Eric Lander, detailing his career path from math genius to human genome-finding pioneer to founding director of The Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT. I love the description of the force that has powered him throughout it all… his simple, fervent desire to understand more, to learn more, to know more, which has taken him in a circuitous but in retrospect quite straightforward path through fields from molecular biology to worm genetics. I also particularly loved his description of the meeting with Professor David Botstein that catalyzed his interest in human genomics. “We went to a whiteboard,” he is quoted as saying, “and started arguing.”
In the video alongside the piece, Lander also argues that the walls between silos that once pervaded the academy have already come down, and that young students these days couldn’t give a fig for boundaries between disciplines such as chemistry, math, biology or computer science. Instead, he describes a “fusion cuisine” of all the disciplines, and argues, buoyantly, that there has never been a better time to be a scientist. [Image c/o The Broad Institute, by Len Rubenstein.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxp30ktZEm1qikpxao1_1280.jpg)
Power in Numbers is a simply charming profile of the incredible polymath, Dr Eric Lander, detailing his career path from math genius to human genome-finding pioneer to founding director of The Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT. I love the description of the force that has powered him throughout it all… his simple, fervent desire to understand more, to learn more, to know more, which has taken him in a circuitous but in retrospect quite straightforward path through fields from molecular biology to worm genetics. I also particularly loved his description of the meeting with Professor David Botstein that catalyzed his interest in human genomics. “We went to a whiteboard,” he is quoted as saying, “and started arguing.”
In the video alongside the piece, Lander also argues that the walls between silos that once pervaded the academy have already come down, and that young students these days couldn’t give a fig for boundaries between disciplines such as chemistry, math, biology or computer science. Instead, he describes a “fusion cuisine” of all the disciplines, and argues, buoyantly, that there has never been a better time to be a scientist. [Image c/o The Broad Institute, by Len Rubenstein.]
