2003

LARRY SUMMERS

Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury

BROAD INSTITUTE

If any American city could claim to be our country’s version of Renaissance Florence—not the biggest city, not the richest city, but the greatest incubator of ideas that cast their influence for-ward through the centuries—it would be Boston. The city where I have lived much of my life, starting as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston is the hub of transforming biology worldwide to significantly reduce human suffering and extend life. The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is an integral part of Boston’s idea-generation, and it’s reaching the world.

When Eli and Edye Broad joined with Eric Lander to begin shaping the concept of the Institute, I knew Harvard, where I was president at the time, needed to be a part of it. We envisioned an ambitious new type of research collaboration between Harvard and MIT. The negotiations were challenging, of course. Likely the best deal in terms of extracting university resources that any donor to the two institutions has ever gotten, the Institute is a tribute to Eli Broad’s tough-minded persistence as well as his deep philanthropy. But it was also a bargain, given our objectives in advancing biological science. And the outcome—progress in the development of new therapies and treatments of major diseases—has been priceless.

The Institute has played a central role in the development of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), the revolutionary genome-editing technology that makes headlines daily. Moreover, the Institute stands for science for the public good, for open access, and for tools that many scientists can use to collaborate across disciplines. That ethos has long been accepted in physics and astronomy, with their shared large-scale accelerators and telescopes, but in the much more humanly consequential field of biology, the Broad Institute is a pioneer.

Detail of Naoe Suzuki’s Unapologetic work of a data parasite (2016; mineral pigment, gouache, colored pencils, and graphite on paper, 45 x 216 in.; courtesy of the artist and the Broad Institute), a work created during the artist’s time as a Broad Institute artist in residence

Human genomic sequencing data (left) and a scientist examining data at the Broad Institute, Camridge Massachusetts (right) / Shiffman & Kohnke (design), courtesy of the Broad Institute: Len Rubenstein (images)

Sketches of chemical compounds on a glass wall at the Broad Institute / Shiffman & Kohnke (design), courtesy of the Broad Institute: Len Rubenstein (image)

Through the work we did on the Institute, I came to know Eli as a visionary philanthropist from whom I could learn and, at the same time, as someone I could support. While serving on The Broad Foundation’s board, I helped formulate a rubric for the Foundation’s giving based on three questions: Will it happen without us? Is the leadership in place to make it happen? Will it make a difference in twenty or more years?

The Institute itself fits this rubric, and it will certainly continue to make a difference far beyond twenty years. In my closet at home, there hangs a starched white Broad Institute lab coat. Every time I see it, I stand a little taller and prouder, reminded of the Institute’s thrilling work for a better future.