The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, formerly the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), is a multidisciplinary institution dedicated to fulfilling the potential of genomics for the biomedical sciences. The Broad Institute was founded as WICGR in 1990, and re-launched in 2004 as a collaboration between MIT, Harvard, the Whitehead Institute, and Harvard-affiliated hospitals, under a $100 million gift from billionaire philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. On November 30, 2005, the Broads announced an additional $100 million gift to the institute ^*.

Note: "Broad" rhymes with "toad", not "thawed".

The faculty and staff of the Broad Institute include medical doctors, geneticists, and molecular, chemical, and computational biologists. The Broad's scientific research programs include:

• Cancer research and medicine
• Medical and Population Genetics
• Genome Biology
• Chemical Biology
• Metabolic Disease
• Infectious Disease
• Psychiatric Disease
• Computational biology and bioinformatics

Eric Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute.

The Broad Institute's facilities at 320 Charles Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, house one of the largest genome sequencing centers in the world. As WICGR, this facility was the largest contributor of sequence information to the Human Genome Project.

In February 2006, much of The Broad Institute relocated to a new building at 7 Cambridge Center, adjacent to the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. This seven-story 231,000 square foot building contains office, research laboratory, retail and museum space.

External links

• Official website