TODD GOLUB
Chief Scientific Officer and Director, Cancer Program,
Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Charles A. Dana Investigator, Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute
Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute© PAUL FETTERSWhen Eric Lander called, Todd Golub answered. It was 1997, and Golub, a young pediatric oncologist, had just opened his first lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He was surprised to get a call from Lander, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) biologist and central figure in the effort to sequence the human genome.
At the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, Lander had early access to an emerging technology called a DNA microarray, which measures the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. Lander believed the tool might be useful in cancer research, so he wanted an oncologist to help him apply it. “I was a new assistant professor and didn’t know how these things were supposed to work, so I just said ‘Sure! Sounds like a cool technology.’ It didn’t occur to me that I should ask permission or that there would be complications to be employed by one university and do research at another,” recalls Golub.
Luckily, Golub smoothed over the conflict and began spending a day a week at the Whitehead Institute. There, he assembled a ...
