Whitehead Institute

The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

Founded in 1982, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research and teaching institution located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The Whitehead Institute was founded as a fiscally independent entity from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and its 17 members hold faculty appointments in the MIT Department of Biology. The Institute is named for businessman and philanthropist Edwin C. “Jack” Whitehead,^[1] who selected David Baltimore (1975 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine) as the Whitehead Institute's Founding Director. Baltimore chose Gerald Fink, Rudolf Jaenisch, Harvey Lodish, and Robert Weinberg as the Whitehead Institute's Founding Members.

The institute is one of the world's leading centers for genomic research. Its Center for Genome Research was active in the Human Genome Project, and reportedly contributed one-third of the human genome sequence announced in June 2000.^[2]

In June 2003, Eli and Edythe L. Broad pledged $100 million to build the Broad Institute, a joint venture of Whitehead, MIT, Harvard and local teaching hospitals. The new venture's mission is to expand tools for genomic medicine and apply them for the treatment of disease.

Whitehead has a world-renowned faculty that includes the recipients of the 1997, 2010, and 2011 National Medal of Science (Weinberg, Susan Lindquist, and Jaenisch, respectively);^[3] nine members of the National Academy of Sciences (David Bartel, Fink, Rudolf Jaenisch, Lindquist, Lodish, Terry Orr-Weaver, David Page, Weinberg, and Richard Young); five Members of the Institute of Medicine (Fink, Jaenisch, Lindquist, Page, and Weinberg); and seven Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Fink, Jaenisch, Lindquist, Lodish, Page, Hidde Ploegh, and Weinberg). All 17 Whitehead faculty are also members of the MIT Department of Biology.

See also

• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Broad Institute

References

External links

• Whitehead Institute