One of the driving forces behind today's revolution in genomics, Dr. Eric Lander will be the principal speaker at Williams College's 214th Commencement on Sunday, June 8, 2003.
Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, will be the Baccalaureate speaker on Saturday, June 7.
President Morton Owen Schapiro will confer honorary degrees on both of them, as well as on Michael R. Beschloss '77, political historian; James MacGregor Burns '39, Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographer; Monica Lozano, president of the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States; Thaddeus Lott, a leader in elementary school education; and Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Eric Lander
Dr. Lander, a member of the Whitehead Institute and founder and director of the Whitehead Center for Genome Research, is recognized for his inspired commitment to the Human Genome Project. Under his leadership, the Center for Genome Research led the effort in constructing a catalog of the human DNA code or genome. The scientific venture, which began in October 1990, was expected to take 15 years, and was completed in April this year, two years ahead of schedule.
"Generating the complete sequence of human DNA is the most exciting adventure in modern science," Dr. Lander said. "Sequencing the human genome will give us new understanding of human development and a broad array of new tools for fighting human disease."
But "sequencing the human genome is no mean feat," and Dr. Lander has compared the task "to assembling one complete set of the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' from 10 shredded copies. To reassemble the pieces, scientists feed them into a reading machine that looks for overlapping paragraphs, words, or phrases. Using these overlaps, the machine patches together a copy of the volume, one sentence at a time."
His center at the Whitehead Institute, part of the academic consortium led by Dr. Francis S. Collins of the National Institutes of Health, completed roughly a quarter of the genome sequence, splitting the genome into large overlapping blocks of DNA, which were read individually. The New York Times called the feat remarkable, "not least because it was carried out by an unusually young staff, many of whom were fresh out of college and lack advanced degrees."
Dr. Lander served as chairman of the group that analyzed the entire, completed genome sequence.
He is also responsible for creating widely used methods for studying complex genetic traits in humans, animals, and plants; employing population genetics to identify human disease genes; and classifying diseases based on patterns of gene expression. He and his colleagues have applied these methods to a wide range of medical problems, including cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and dwarfism.
In an interview in Technology Review, Dr. Lander said, "I think what biologists are going to be doing for the next decade is figuring out the circuitry of the genome by monitoring how the 50,000 to 100,0000 genes are turned on and off and how all the proteins come on and off in the cell. A lot of technology is going to be needed to do that. "ยข I see a real merger of physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science to be able to build these detectors and interpret their results."
In addition to his research, Dr. Lander, a professor of biology, has taught MIT's core introductory biology course for a decade, and in 1992 won the Baker Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching at MIT.
Dr. Lander, who at 17 won a $10,000 scholarship in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search with a paper on quasi-perfect numbers, earned a B.A. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1978 and a D.Phil. in Mathematics from the University of Oxford in 1981.
He was awarded a Rhodes in 1978; a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (known as the "genius award") in 1987 for his work in genetics; the Rhodes Memorial Award from the American Association for Cancer Research in 1995; the Dickson Prize in Medicine in 1997, and the Gairdner Foundation Award, considered one of the most prestigious international awards in medical research, in 2002.
In recognition of his "research on the application of mathematical and statistical approaches to molecular genetics," he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1990. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Gwen Ifill
Ms. Ifill has covered the White House, Congress, government, and presidential campaigns for the Boston Herald American, the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Washington Post, The New York Times, and then for television audiences.
Her introduction to television came when she was asked by Maryland Public Television to be a panelist on its weekly program analyzing local issues. When she moved to Washington to work at the Post, she became a regular panelist on WETA's roundtable discussion.
When Ms. Ifill moved from the Post to The New York Times' Washington bureau in 1991, her first major assignment was following Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton. After the election, she was made a Congressional correspondent and then promoted to the White House beat before she left in 1994 to join NBC News.
At NBC News she covered politics, including presidential campaigns, key legislative issues in Congress, and the impeachment of President Clinton. Her reports appeared on the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, Today, and on MSNBC.
When she was chosen to be moderator of PBS' 33-year-old political talk show Washington Week in Review in 1999, she became not only the first female to host a prominent news show on national television, but the first African American as well. Producers at Washington Week heralded Ifill's debut with an ad campaign that said, "TV's Voice of Reason Has a New Face."
"You don't transcend being black," she told the Washington Post the evening of her debut on Washington Week. "You broaden someone's stereotype of what it means to be black. There are people who get nervous when you bring up the subject of race because we're schooled in this country to think it's a negative. I always think of it as a plus."
She is also senior political correspondent and occasional anchor on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
"I can't stress how important it is that young people know that anything is possible for them, and that if it means that a little black girl sitting in her living room somewhere sees me on TV and thinks 'maybe I could do that,' then I feel like my day's work is done," she told the Christian Science Monitor. "I want to be that kind of example." She says she caught the "journalism bug" when she was a child sitting in front of her family's TV set watching the news.
"Despite being a black woman in an industry that was until recent years dominated by white men, I can't look at my career and say I've been held back," she said in an interview for Broadcasting & Cable.
A 1977 graduate of Simmons College, she serves on the board of the Harvard University Institute of Politics and the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
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