In the annals of academic rivalries, perhaps none is fiercer than the crosstown one between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
So getting both institutions to contribute their names, faculty, staff and money — big money —to a joint research institute was akin to negotiating a truce between Montagues and Capulets.
Eric Lander, the institute’s founder, had laid the groundwork for a joint venture: For his genomics center at the Whitehead Institute at M.I.T., he had tapped the expertise of doctors and scientists at Harvard’s medical school and its affiliated hospitals.
“Eric felt, rightly, that while M.I.T. had wonderful computer science, engineering, physics, research, unless you formally involved Harvard and the hospitals and the medical science, you would get into trouble,” said Dr. David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize biologist who introduced Dr. Lander to the billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.
Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, agreed to be the keystone supporters of the new institute. But first the two giants at either end of Massachusetts Avenue had to be convinced.
The first formal meeting to discuss it took place over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. One of the few things that everyone who attended can agree on is that it was pretty much a disaster.
Dr. Steven E. Hyman, then the Harvard provost, recalls that the institutions’ presidents — Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard and Charles M. Vest of M.I.T. — approached it from different angles: Dr. Vest saw it as a chance to build relationships, while Dr. Summers “was very transactional and impatient, like he always is.”
Dr. Summers does not dispute that. “There had been a certain amount of keeping things going on happy talk,” he said in an interview, “and I thought it better to surface some problems that were going to come up.”
Dr. Vest had to contend with the reluctance of his own trustees to share the Whitehead’s prestige and resources with Harvard. “They kept saying, ‘Why do you want to let the camel’s nose under the tent?’ ” he recalled.”
But he realized that to achieve Dr. Lander’s vision, M.I.T. needed Harvard’s medical resources. So after the dreadful lunch, Dr. Vest called Dr. Summers. “There is a kind of warm and altruistic side of Larry,” he said, adding that finally “we both decided it was just the right thing to do.”
The two presidents left it to their provosts to hammer out the deal over a long series of breakfasts and dinners, many with “lawyers, guns and money” — and far worse than the lunch at the faculty club, said Dr. Hyman, now himself a visiting scholar at Broad.
M.I.T. has an orderly, centralized decision-making process; Harvard’s is highly decentralized. Harvard’s hospitals — Massachusetts General, Dana-Farber, and Brigham and Women’s — were worried that the new institute would cannibalize their best investigators. Decisions had to be made about issues like intellectual property and how grant money would be assigned to the various partners. “It was a messy process involving big personalities and different cultures, ripe for misunderstanding,” Dr. Hyman said. Still, as Dr. Summers recalled, “it was a no-brainer that Harvard had to be part of it.” He added, “I doubt there is anything more important that Harvard has done in the last quarter century.”
Today, the Broad Institute is a stand-alone entity that is still a joint venture of Harvard and M.I.T. Mr. and Mrs. Broad have pledged a total of $600 million to support it. For their part, said Mr. Broad, who has built two major businesses — KB Homes and the insurance company SunAmerica, now owned by A.I.G. — “my wife and I believe the most important thing we will have done in our lifetime is to be involved with the creating of the Broad Institute.”
NYT