Eric Lander: Power in Numbers
Earlier this month, friend of the Festival, preeminent geneticist, and all-around great human being, Eric Lander, was featured in the New York Times’ “Profiles in Science” series. The piece unravels the fascinating path that took him from an early Ph.D. in pure math at Oxford, to a stint teaching at the Harvard business school, and eventually to the forefront of human genomics and medicine.
This is the same extraordinary path we highlighted during the 2011 World Science Festival’s “Pioneers in Science” series, an annual program that gives middle and high school students the rare opportunity to interact with world-renowned scientists. (Watch the video above or go here)
Dr. Lander’s story can be told as a linear narrative of lucky breaks and perfect opportunities. But he doesn’t subscribe to that sort of magical thinking. To him, biography is something of a confection: “You live your life prospectively and tell your story retrospectively, so it looks like everything is converging.”Yet given that limitation to recreating a personal history, Dr. Lander’s story is, at the very least, unusual.
Read the full story in “Power in Numbers” by Gina Kolata, and check out the accompanying video interview in which Lander describes some of his current interests—the excitement of transcending traditional disciplines, the joy of collaboration, and how scientists need to take time to think about big questions and ask how results are being used in the world. To hear Lander discuss some big ideas—like researching and treating diseases in the developing world, and the evolution of our fight against cancer—watch the World Science Festival 2011 program Cancer’s Last Stand.
You can watch more clips featuring Eric Lander here
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