News

The Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research and the International Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium today announced the publication of the genetic blueprint of a mouse together with insights gleaned from comparing mouse and human sequences.

Whitehead Institute Member Richard Young's lab has discovered a unique approach to vaccine development, which is now in phase II and III human clinical trials for the cancer-causing human papilloma virus.

In today’s research arena, success requires biologists, physicians, chemists, mathematicians, and bioinformatics specialists to funnel unique expertise into shared projects. At Whitehead, interdisciplinary collaboration has fostered discoveries at the intersection of what were once disparate disciplines and has inspired the Institute to aggressively recruit diverse talent to the lab.

Known for groundbreaking work in the study of the stress response and protein folding, Susan L. Lindquist, the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, will receive an honorary degree from Ursinus College on Nov. 12, 2002.

The Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research is part of an international research consortium that today launched a $100 million public-private effort to build the next generation map of the human genome. Called a "haplotype map," this effort is expected to make it easier, faster, and perhaps cheaper to find genes that predispose us to common diseases such as diabetes and cancer.

Imagine popping a movie into the VCR or DVD player and watching a list of credits for two hours—no movie, no plot, no dialogue—just the cast. That’s the problem facing contemporary biology. The human genome project has provided researchers with a growing list of genes—basically a cast of thousands of characters, running life inside the cell. But the key to understanding life, both in health and sickness, is the script that outlines how these cellular players interact, communicate, and cue each other.

Prion diseases—such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans—have stumped scientists for decades with a complex "whodunit" complete with many suspects and a missing murder weapon. Unlike other infectious diseases that are linked to pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, these diseases have a unique and mysterious connection to a misfolded protein.

Some people carry better genetic armor for resisting infectious disease than others. For example, many Africans have allelic variants of several different genes that provide some resistance to malaria. Geneticists would like to know whether such resistance arose through selective pressure or merely represents random mutations that remain in the population.

The Whitehead Institute recently welcomed David Sabatini as its newest faculty member. Sabatini, who joined the Institute in 1997 as a Whitehead Fellow, was named an Associate Member at Whitehead and an Assistant Professor in the biology department at MIT.

The Genome Center got in touch with its spiritual side last week when it brought together Whitehead’s Tibetian employees—the largest Tibetan workforce in Cambridge—for afternoon tea. Almost fifty members of the Whitehead Tibetan community joined Genome Center Director Eric Lander to discuss his upcoming visit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.