At the General Meeting on 13 February Eric S. Lander, Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School, and President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was elected to the Academy’s Class for biosciences.
Eric S. Lander is one of the most cited scientists in the world. Since the mid-1980s, he has developed general principles and methods for identifying genes underlying human disease and has enabled the application of these principles throughout medicine through pioneering work to create and analyze genetic, physical and sequence maps of the human genome. In particular, he was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, an international project that mapped the entire human genome, completed in 2003. The work has propelled the discovery of many thousands of disease genes, in inherited disorders and cancer. His genomic studies have also contributed to a number of major breakthroughs in gene regulation, evolution and population genetics.