From fusion to retooling cancer trials, Eric Lander wants his new group to ‘go after big problems’
Throughout his storied career, Eric Lander has led science projects in just about every setting there is: academia at MIT and Harvard Medical School, independent nonprofit research institutions like the Whitehead and the Broad institutes, startups, think tanks, international consortia, and the federal government. But President Biden’s former science adviser and long-time leader of the Broad never found a space totally free of the constraints of doing science in America.
Grants, university and government bureaucracy, market forces — they all limit in some way how researchers might approach a particular problem. Which is why last summer he created Science for America, a nonprofit organization that brings researchers and technologists together to get outside their own labs and their own heads to think big about tackling some of the most pressing problems threatening humanity.
