Dr. Eric S. Lander
Readings From the Book of Life
President Schapiro, Fellow Honorary Degree Recipients, Trustees, Faculty, Parents, Family and Guests:
Please join me in saluting again this extraordinary group of young people — the Williams College Graduating Class of 2003.
And, to the graduating class of 2003, your class speaker A.J. got it right: You did not “come this far” on your own. So, please join me in giving a standing ovation to the parents, families, friends and faculty who helped you to reach the lofty height that you have attained today.
I am deeply honored that you have asked me to share this special day with you. I have no personal ties to Williams College; my own alma mater was Princeton University. But I see many similarities between these two schools that make me feel right at home here.
Both colleges are focused on providing the finest undergraduate educations in the world — regarding the mind, in the words of Williams’s first president Mark Hopkins, “as a flame that is to be fed.”
Both colleges enjoy idyllic campuses, with tree-lined walks and graceful buildings — providing suitable sanctuary for thought and reflection.
Both colleges boast fiercely loyal alumni bodies, having among the highest rates of alumni participation — a tribute to the life-shaping experience of attending such extraordinary institutions.
Both colleges can even claim a bit of sports history: Williams played in the first intercollegiate baseball game in 1859; 10 years later, Princeton played in the first intercollegiate football game. Incidentally, Williams and Princeton both lost these historic games.
And, both colleges have certain long-standing and slightly wacky student traditions:
At Princeton, it was a point of honor that the entering freshman class should — as soon as possible after arrival — contrive to steal the large metal bell clapper from the tower high atop Nassau Hall. The idea being, of course, that since the bell’s ring called students to classes, silencing the bell would postpone the start of the academic year.
At Williams, members of the graduating senior class mount the tower of the college chapel and hurl a watch to the ground. By tradition, if the watch breaks, it ensures good luck.
It is striking that these two rituals both involve the stopping of time. At Princeton, freezing the moment just before one enters college. At Williams, freezing the moment just before one finally leaves college.
Although both traditions have their roots in undergraduate hijinks, they have a transcendent wisdom — recognizing the importance of savoring a unique moment in your lives.
President Schapiro informs me that the watch drop was successful and thus time indeed stands frozen for this commencement day. I invite you to savor this extraordinary moment — the moment before you truly enter upon the world.
Up until today, your path — from kindergarten through college — has been clearly marked.
From tomorrow, you each begin to make your own choices — to chart your distinctive paths through life.
With good health, your careers will span about 50 years; from your early 20s to your early 70s. From the perspective of the graduating seniors, a span of 50 years must seem almost an infinite duration. But, as you will come to know, it is somewhat less than infinite.
What is a span of 50 years? Let me illustrate by drawing on the experience of my own academic discipline: science — in particular, the study of genetics and genomics.
It was exactly 50 years ago that two young upstarts — an erstwhile ornithologist named James Watson and a wayward physicist named Francis Crick — published a one-page paper in a scientific journal entitled: “A structure for deoxyribonucleic acid.”
Crick and Watson had discovered DNA&38217;s elegant double helix, and they realized that it held, as they put it, “the secret of life.” The structure immediately suggested how the genetic material is copied (with the two strands of the double helix each serving as a template for other) and how the genetic material must encode information (in the precise sequence of its letters, As, Ts, Cs and Gs). They had indeed glimpsed the secret of life. It was a singular and sublime discovery.
But what is even more inspiring to me is what happened over the next 50 years — through the work of the thousands that followed.
Watson and Crick’s discovery was completely abstract, totally impractical. In 1953, they had not the slightest idea how DNA actually encoded hereditary information and no way to read even a single letter of the DNA code of any organism. As Watson and Crick freely admit today, the notion that one would ever be able to read out the complete genetic information of an organism was preposterous. More so the notion that it would happen within their lifetimes.
But their idea had sparked — to again borrow Mark Hopkins’s image — a flame in the minds of the scientific community. Never underestimate the power of an idea.
Within 15 years the scientific community had cracked the basic design of the genetic code — the correspondence by which three letters of DNA specify an amino acid in a protein. One still couldn’t read any particular part of the genetic text, but one knew in principle how it worked. Some were content to stop with this general outline, but others pressed on.
Within 15 more years the scientific community had developed ways to propagate individual pieces of DNA and to read out bits of DNA sequence in a slow and tedious process. One might read an average of a hundred DNA letters per day — just enough to eventually study an individual gene, which might range in size from thousands to tens of thousands of letters long. Some were content to study individual genes one at a time, but others pressed on.
By about 1985, scientists began floating the notion of a Human Genome Project, an organized effort to read out the entire 3 billion letters of the human genome; to put this fundamental information in the hands of scientists everywhere. At the then-current rates of DNA sequencing, it would take hundreds to thousands of years to accomplish this feat. Moreover, some worried that, even if we could get the information, we’d not be able to make much sense of it. But, after much heated debate, the scientific community concluded in the late-1980s that it might just be possible and that it was worth trying.
Initial efforts were launched and, little by little, they gained momentum.
The Human Genome Project was not centrally organized nor tightly controlled, and, as a result, it grew into a loose international consortium involving some of the brightest young minds in science.
Within a few years, scientists had rudimentary maps that allowed us to locate certain genes responsible for diseases.
Within a few more years, we had the DNA sequence of some very small genomes.
Within a few more years, by mid-2000, we had a rough draft sequence of the human genome — still imperfect, with 10% missing and many holes.
But, 8 weeks ago, in April, the scientific community gathered in Washington to announce that we now had an essentially complete sequence of the human genome.
In fact, we chose the target completion date a-purpose — we chose it so that we could celebrate two milestones in precisely the same week: the completion of the Human Genome Project and the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery. And what a week it was!
So, what is a span of 50 years? It is roughly the amount of time it takes for one new idea to completely change the world.
That is roughly the time you are allotted — just enough time to change the world.
So, we now finally have the Book of Life — one of the greatest texts on this planet, the patient product of 3.5 billion years of evolution.
What have we learned so far? From the book itself and from the way it was obtained?
There are many lessons: some scientific, some social and some personal. Let me share a few with you.
From a scientific perspective, the human genome sequence is remarkable.
One of the great surprises has been the small number of genes encoded within the human genome. For a decade I had taught MIT students the official textbook figure of approximately 100,000 protein-coding genes. You can imagine how shocked I was to discover that there are actually only about 25,00030,000 genes.
This small number is particularly unsettling because it implies that the human being has only about as many genes as a mustard weed. This has been taken by some as an affront to human dignity, although I read it more as a lesson in humility — as well as a homily that it is not how much you have, but what you do with it, that matters.
Of course, the importance of the human gene list is that it provides a kind of Periodic Table for Medicine. Just as chemistry was transformed at the beginning of the 20th century by the availability of a complete list of building blocks of matter, so too is biology being transformed at the beginning of the 21st century by the availability of a complete list of the building blocks of life.
Biomedical scientists are aiming to rethink every human disease in molecular terms. Already, we know the molecular basis of more than 1000 genetic disorders (mostly rare conditions) and are now beginning to tackle the more common disorders, such as heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and susceptibility to infectious disease.
For example, I can tell the graduating class than 1% of you carry a common genetic variant that renders you nearly completely resistant to the AIDS virus HIV (lucky you!) and 3% of you have a common variant that confers an extremely high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in life (unlucky you!).
The ability to perform such genetic diagnostics raises challenging ethical issues that we must address, but the real importance of such knowledge is that it reveals cellular pathways that point to new therapies that may help everyone.
I am confident that, within the next 20 years, we will finally understand the molecular basis for essentially all common diseases. This will represent a watershed in medicine. Of course, this knowledge does not guarantee that we will be able to fashion cures. We cannot make such promises. But such knowledge sure beats ignorance in trying to tackle disease.
The human genome sequence also speaks to us about our relationship to one another:
By comparing human genomes, we see that human beings are more than 99.9% identical at the genetic level. As species go, this is a tiny difference. Two random orangutans in South East Asia differ by 10 times as much as any two humans on this planet. Genetic analysis teaches that we are all the descendants of a small founding population a few thousand generations ago — a tiny species grown large in the blink of an eye. Genetics then offers no scientific justification for racism, ethnic hatred or xenophobia.
The Human Genome Project holds important social lessons as well.
The project was a testament to the power of collective action. Done by no one center, no one country, it was the collective product of several thousand people — including many young scientists in their 20s and 30s. For all of us, it was exhilarating to be part of something so much bigger than ourselves, to be part of something that we would be proud to someday tell our children, to be part of something that might even — perhaps — someday save our own child’s life.
The project was also a testament to the power of openness. One of the founding principles of the Human Genome Project was that the information would be made freely and immediately available to everyone — whether in academia or industry, whether in rich countries or poor countries. At the time, not everyone agreed with this policy and there were attempts to privatize the project and its knowledge.
But the scientific community held its ground. And, today, the complete openness of the information has been responsible for having launched thousands of medical projects. The human genome sequence is an example of a public good — something that can achieve its optimal social value only if it is freely available to all and therefore something that is society&38217;s collective responsibility to produce.
Finally, let me offer to the graduating class a more personal lesson from the Human Genome Project — a lesson about the nature of careers.
On my own graduation day — 25 years ago last week — I had no clue what I really wanted to do with my life. I suspect some of the graduating class may feel the same way today.
I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in pure mathematics because I loved mathematics, but with no clear idea where it would lead as a career. Late in graduate school, I cast about for what to do. Feeling that I wanted something worldly, I managed to finagle a job teaching managerial economics on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.
After a while I realized that economics was not my passion and I cast about further. I became interested in biology and started moonlighting in laboratories by night while still teaching MBAs by day. [Throughout this time, I was pretty worried about my long-term career prospects.]
One day, by complete chance, I met a colleague who began to pepper me with questions about human genetics. I was completely captivated. Within a year, the biology community began debating the idea of a Human Genome Project and I found myself drawn in. I’ve never looked back.
In retrospect, my background in mathematics, management and biology seems a brilliant preparation for the Human Genome Project. In prospect, of course, it was an utterly random walk with no planning whatsoever.
What lessons do I draw from this?
Lives are not planned in advance, but rather assembled from passions.
Put yourself in places where you will be surrounded by smart and wonderful people, for it is there that lucky accidents will be most likely to happen. And, when they happen, don't be afraid to follow them where they lead.
So, there you have it. Those are my own Readings from the Book of Life — scientific, social and personal.
Today, time stands still. Enjoy this moment, savor it, celebrate it, bask in it.
Tomorrow, the hands of time resume their motion and you will be on your way.
Rather wonderfully, you are each allotted just enough time to change the world — to change it in big ways and in small ways — both are equally important.
We will all watch with great interest to see how each of you will choose to change the world. Indeed, we are all very much depending on you to do so.
Congratulations to great Class of 2003 and Good Luck!
June 8, 2003