Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Overview

The largest private bet ever placed on understanding mental illness began with a teenager’s breakdown in a New York deli. In 1988, Jonathan Stanley — 19, fleeing imagined government agents for three days — was found naked and perched on a crate, then committed to a psychiatric facility and diagnosed with bipolar disorder (Chronicle of Philanthropy). That episode set his parents, Ted and Vada Stanley, on a path that would make them the largest philanthropic supporters of psychiatric research in history. In 2007 they pledged $10 million to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to study the genetic basis of mental illness — and the next day Ted Stanley called back with a bigger idea: $100 million over ten years to found the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research (Harvard Gazette). In 2014, a year after Vada’s death, he eclipsed that with a $650 million commitment — the largest gift ever made for psychiatric research — bringing his total philanthropy to the Broad past $825 million (Harvard Gazette). That $650 million check is the clearest way to understand what the Broad Institute actually is: not a university department, but an independently organized research engine large enough to absorb the biggest philanthropic bets in science — and built from the Human Genome Project’s MIT flagship to take on problems no single lab could touch.

A father’s question, answered with DNA

The Stanley commitment landed with deliberate timing: hours earlier, a 300-scientist consortium including Broad researchers had published in Nature the first map of 108 regions of the human genome associated with schizophrenia (Harvard Gazette). The biological causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had mystified scientists for decades — until five years before the gift, there was not even clear evidence of a single gene contributing to either illness (Harvard Gazette). The Broad’s answer was industrial-scale genetics: a collaborative network spanning more than 60 institutions in 25 countries that assembled the world’s largest DNA collection in psychiatric research — over 175,000 samples from people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and ADHD, plus healthy controls (Harvard Gazette).

The scale was not decorative. When the gift was announced, Broad researchers had already linked more than 100 genomic regions to schizophrenia and were beginning to pinpoint specific mutations and the biological processes they disrupted, such as neurons’ impaired ability to communicate (Harvard Gazette). By 2020, the effort had grown to more than 800 scientists in 36 countries who had analyzed the genes of 180,000 people — including people with mental illness in Africa, a deliberate correction to a field whose samples were overwhelmingly white European and American — and identified 250 genes potentially related to mental illness (Chronicle of Philanthropy). The money also bought what the field had lost: with large pharmaceutical companies having abandoned psychiatric drug development as too hard, the Stanley funding drew pharma back into neuroscience and gave young researchers reason to specialize in it (Harvard Gazette, Chronicle of Philanthropy). The Stanley Center’s work is run by more than 150 scientists and led, from 2012, by Steven Hyman — the psychiatrist who had run the National Institute of Mental Health from 1996 to 2001 and nearly lost hope that psychiatric biology could be cracked in his lifetime (Harvard Gazette).

The CRISPR patent war it won by filing second

The Broad’s other famous fight was over CRISPR-Cas9, and it won the American rights despite filing later. UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier applied for a CRISPR patent in May 2012 — before Broad’s Feng Zhang filed — but the Broad paid for an expedited patent-review process and got its patents approved first (Chemical & Engineering News). Berkeley’s argument was that no “special sauce” was needed to adapt CRISPR to eukaryotic cells, making the Broad’s patents conflict with its own application; the US Patent and Trademark Office disagreed, ruling in February 2017 that the Broad’s invention was nonobvious — “no interference-in-fact” (Chemical & Engineering News). Berkeley appealed, and in September 2018 the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the decision, leaving the Broad with the foundational American patents for CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotes — plants and animals, including humans, the technology’s most lucrative application (Chemical & Engineering News).

The ruling’s fine print mattered as much as the outcome. Because the court found no interference, judges never decided who actually invented CRISPR — the question Berkeley wanted answered (Chemical & Engineering News). The scientific community answered it its own way: Doudna and Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and all three early inventors — Doudna, Charpentier and Vilnius University’s Virginijus Šikšnys, whose patent had been filed weeks before Berkeley’s — shared the Kavli Prize for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 (Chemical & Engineering News). The legal split had commercial consequences too: the victory buoyed Editas Medicine, co-founded by Zhang to develop CRISPR therapies, while Intellia Therapeutics and CRISPR Therapeutics — licensed from Berkeley and Charpentier respectively — were left without a foundational US patent on the technology they were built on (Chemical & Engineering News).

Nine days from phone call to test

The Broad’s industrial capacity showed its sharpest edge in March 2020. On Monday, March 9, Broad core member Deborah Hung — an infectious-disease physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — called colleague Michael Mina about the desperate shortage of SARS-CoV-2 testing; Massachusetts had 41 cases, a number that would more than double by the next morning as the governor declared a state of emergency (Broad Institute). The Genomics Platform shut down most of its standard production work and converted its CLIA-certified clinical sequencing lab — a subsidiary built in 2013 for automated, high-throughput clinical work — into a COVID testing facility: the CDC’s manual protocol was adapted to robotic liquid handlers by Friday, March 13, temporary biosafety walls were completed March 18, and the lab became a Massachusetts state reference lab, coordinated with the Baker-Polito administration’s COVID-19 Response Command Center (Broad Institute). Within about a year, the program had scaled from roughly 5,000 tests a day to some 135,000 daily tests, including pooled, low-cost testing at dozens of Massachusetts schools (GenomeWeb).

What the Broad is, institutionally

The Broad grew out of the Whitehead Institute’s Center for Genome Research at MIT, which had generated roughly a third of the DNA sequence data for the Human Genome Project — the single largest contribution to the effort (Harvard Gazette). Formally established in 2003, it is a partnership of MIT, Harvard, Harvard-affiliated hospitals and the Whitehead Institute, built to create tools for genomic medicine and make them freely available to the world (Harvard Gazette). It is named for lead donors Eli and Edythe Broad, who pledged $100 million over ten years at the founding (Harvard Gazette). The scale of its sequencing and computing operations drew research-computing engineers like James Cuff, whose career path ran through the Broad Institute on the way to Harvard. In January 2021, founding director Eric Lander stepped down to become the first life scientist to serve as White House science adviser to President Biden, and the board appointed co-founder Todd R. Golub — a cancer-genetics researcher who had helped lead the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research, the Broad’s precursor — as director (Harvard Gazette). The board overseeing that transition included Princeton University’s president emerita, Shirley Tilghman (Harvard Gazette).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the Broads’ reported 2008 $400 million endowment: the figure is widely repeated but was not verified from a source read in full. It does not claim a specific legal form (such as 501(c)(3)) for the institute, because the only fully-read sourcing described it functionally as a partnership and research institution. It does not assert Eric Lander’s whereabouts or role after his February 2022 White House resignation, which was not verified from a fully-read source. It does not treat the Broad’s own account of the COVID lab conversion as anything but uncontested operational facts, and notes that GenomeWeb’s ~135,000-tests-per-day figure comes from a paywalled lede. And it makes no claim about the Stanley Center’s current leadership beyond Steven Hyman’s directorship from 2012.