Friday’s inauguration of new MIT president L. Raphael Reif included all the usual pomp, plus some. Music for the event included a piece by a Senegalese drum ensemble and a performance of “A Rhumba for Raphael Reif” written by MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Harbison. More below.
Carl Zimmer, a journalist who writes for the NYTimes and others, tooled around Boston and Cambridge this week.
When new drug development company H3 decided to throw a party to launch the opening of Kendall Square labs and offices, organizers didn’t have to go very far. They took the elevator downstairs.
Last week, local researchers, bio boosters and lots of men in dark suits from the Japanese drug company Eisai gathered in the trendy meetings room at the new Catalyst restaurant.
Floor to ceiling windows overlook a landscaped concrete plaza that joins the cluster of new and renovated mid-rises known as Technology Square. The landlord, lab developer Alexandria Properties, chose the restaurant — and the former chef of now closed Aujourd’hui — with meetings like this one in mind. Thus, 1,900-square-feet of meeting space behind the dining room can be split up into the Crick, Franklin and Watson rooms. (The rest of the restaurant is farm-to-table chic, with panelling made of old barn boards a “two-way fireplace” encased in glass.)
Before the ribbon cutting, waiters worked their way through the crowd with minted oysters on the half shell and tuna tartar. Slides with information about the H3—for “human, health and hope” — looped on two flat screens embedded in the blonde wood siding.
Betting on an approach emerging from the Broad Institute labs, the company plans on “integrating human cancer genomics with next-generation synthetic organic chemistry and tumor biology.” In other words, they plan to use genetic insights gleaned from actual cancer patients to identify therapeutic targets.
H3 Biomedicine is not your standard startup. Rather than seek out venture capital, the company arrives as a subsidiary of Japanese drug maker Eisai. In turn Eisai, which makes anti-cancer cancer drugs along with an epilepsy treatment, has invested $200 million into H3. Many gathered at the event had “Eisai” on their name tags and company president Haruo Naito flew in for the champagne toast. Click here’s for Mass High Tech’s take on the event.
Angus McQuilken, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, told the group that “If you stand in Kendall Square and throw a rock in any directions, you’ll hit a world class scientist.” Two of them are H3’s “scientific founders” Dr. Stuart Schreiber and Dr.Todd Golub, both of the Broad. The website Xconomy describes them as “scientific luminaries.”
H3 aims to discover small molecule drugs that target weak points in tumors that have been uncovered through genetic studies of people’s cancers. Fittingly, both Golub and Schreiber are founders of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, one of the largest genomic research centers in the world. Schreiber, an expert at synthesizing drug compounds to home in on disease proteins, has been a founder of numerous biotech companies such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals and more recently Forma Therapeutics. Golub, a fellow scientific founder of Forma, is an authority on the genetics of cancer.
Always worth noting that much of the seed money that allows the Broad researchers to move into drug discovery comes from the feds. The National Institutes of Health database reports that for 2010 and 2011, Golub is working with grants worth $9 7 million, which included about $4 million for the Broad Cancer Center. Schreiber lists $22.3 million in grants, including $15 million money for including Broad comprehensive screening program
Massachusetts environmental regulator recognized that there is a big difference between TB and Ebola. So, last week, they granted Boston University permission to begin using their
new biolab to work on bio safety level-2 materials.
For years, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory — a high-security biolab designed to allow scientists to conduct research on the world’s deadliest germs, such as Ebola and plague — has been tied up by legal challenges and regulatory reviews.
As the legal process dragged on, the 192,000-square-foot building has sat largely empty. In August, BU sought a waiver from the state to proceed with research on less hazardous materials …
A spokeswoman for BU said today that the university is not abandoning plans to eventually use about 16 percent of the building, located on its medical campus in the South End, as a biosafety level-4 lab. However those plans are still undergoing an environmental safety review by the National Institutes of Health.
Here’s BU’s take on the decision from the In-house web site, BU Today:
The first research scheduled for the state-of-the-art facility would consist of two projects involving nonpathogenic tuberculosis. One study, led by James Galagan, a College of Engineering associate professor of biomedical engineering and a scientist at the Broad Institute, will use computational biology, genomics, and lab work to study the genetic on/off switches of a nonpathogenic relative of the bacterium that causes TB..
The second project, under the direction of Igor Kramnik, a MED associate professor of medicine and director of MED’s Aerobiology Core, will explore the interaction between the vaccine strain of TB and mammalian hosts. Kramnik hopes to learn more about which factors confer resistance to the bacterium.
Most of Harvard’s Science and Cooking Lectures are first come, first served, so to speak. But, you needed a ticket for Tuesday’s return of superstar Spanish chef and modernist Ferran Adrià of elBulli, who talked about “The New Culinary Think Tank – el bulli 2.0.” And they were scooped up a few days after they became available.
But, you can watch this video of last week’s talk:
Here’s what’s happening in town his week:
The Massachusetts Aids Action Committee has a full listing ot World AIDS Day events.
We’ll be reporting from this one:
AIDS @ 30 International Symposium
9am-3pm
Location: Harvard Medical School, Joseph B. Martin Conference Center, 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02115
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of AIDS, Harvard University is convening a major international symposium.
Several hundred global health leaders, elected officials, scientists, artists and activists will gather to reflect on what we have learned from AIDS and how to apply those lessons towards ending the epidemic.
The two-day event, hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health, begins on December 1, World AIDS Day 2011.
Registration is required for this event. The General Registration fee is $250, Student Registration is $50.
For more information, please contact Tamera Kingston, Events Coordinator at tkingston@hsph.harvard.edu.
The Globe has a story on MIT’s plans for Kendall Square, which describes the school’s backyard as “urban desert, with unused spaces and buildings isolated by wide streets, exaggerating the sense of emptiness.”
That view is a little dated as the bleak landscape made huge progress on the cool curve this summer. In addition to a burst of new restaurants, add this to support that conclusion — it was hard to find a parking space on a recent Thursday night.
Read more of the Globe story here.
Or, take a look yourself:
This Times profile is getting a lot of ink. Check it out.
(For more on the other side of Pinker’s controversial ideas about gender and the brain, check out this New Yorker story ($) about his nemesis, Elizabeth Spelke. Or see this video of their debate.)
On Pinker, Carl Zimmer writes:
As a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he pored over transcripts of children’s speech, looking for telling patterns in the mistakes they made as they mastered verbs. Out of this research, he proposed that our brains contain two separate systems that contribute to language. One combines elements of language to build up meaning; the other is like a mental dictionary we keep in our memory.
This research helped to convince Dr. Pinker that language has deep biological roots. Some linguists argued that language simply emerged as a byproduct of an increasingly sophisticated brain, but he rejected that idea. “Language is so woven into what makes humans human,” he said, “that it struck me as inconceivable that it was just an accident.”
Instead, he concluded that language was an adaptation produced by natural selection. Language evolved like the eye or the hand, thanks to the way it improved reproductive success. In 1990 he published a paper called “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” with his student Paul Bloom, now at Yale. The paper was hugely influential.
UMass Amherst news office has a release on a study looking at bats skulls:
“This study conducted during the International Year of the Bat offers a clear example of how the evolution of new traits, in this case a skull with a new shape, allowed animals to use new resources and eventually, to rapidly evolve into many new species,” (Elizabeth) Dumont (of UMass) says. “We found that when a new ecological niche opened up with an opportunity for bats that could eat hard fruits, they shifted their diet significantly, which in turn led to the evolution of new species.”
The skulls and faces of a nectar-eating bat (left) an insect-eating bat (middle) and a fruit bat (right). The short skulls of fruit bats allow them to bite harder than nectar or insect-eating bats.
Photos courtesy of Elizabeth Dumont, University of Massachusetts Amherst