I contacted Golub for a Zoom interview from his home in Newton. It was his first interview since he was mentioned on the post. Our conversation has been cut short for a long time.
How did you find out that Eric Lander became a White House scientific advisor?
It all happened pretty quickly, because things work for the government. I think it’s really great for the country, and Eric is really the person to do this. He has such a vision and the ability to get things done.
Was it a foregone conclusion that you would replace him?
It was a discussion that the board had to have first. But then again, as a co-founder of the Broad, who was there from the start, as Chief Scientific Officer and as a member of the executive leadership team, it was not shocking when I was appointed for the role.
What will change the research agenda and the work you plan in the post-Lander era?
It’s worth taking a step back and keeping a little eye on where we’re from, because I think that indicates where we’re going. The earliest days of the Broad were deeply rooted in genomics – the technical aspects of mapping the human genome – because that was the work really needed to lay the groundwork for the field.
Over the past 16 years, there has been a movement toward deepening biology and deepening our links with medicine and hospitals. We’re going to double those directions – deepen our links with our local hospitals, deepen our commitment to working on therapeutics, introduce new approaches to biology and chemistry to drug discovery, and deepen our links with industry in that regard. Much of the work to be done will be done at the intersection of academia and the private sector, where together we tackle really important issues.
How have you been involved in the COVID-19 testing at the Broad?
I see the COVID tests as a good example of the Broad’s philosophy that it should address the major challenges we face, and that it should be organized and have a culture that allows it to be nimble so that it most can respond to major challenges. Years ago, the main challenge was “Let’s figure out how to sequence the human genome,” and if a new sequencing technology becomes available Monday, you should be able to respond Tuesday. COVID is another example of this. Our culture and our organization allowed us to adapt quickly. What was needed was very high throughput, available, ideally inexpensive genomic tests. We were perfectly ready to do that.
It looks like you are working from home. Do you regularly enter the building?
Like many Broadies, I spend a lot of time working from home. My current schedule comes in two days a week. I still spend a lot of that time on Zoom, even though I’m in the building. But it’s good to be in the Broad and see the Institute come back to life. Our labs are now fully functional, everyone is back, the pace of work is back and the energy is back – even though many offices are still empty. People who are not with the [lab] bank are largely at home, as they should be. We’ve been intentionally conservative, but data-driven on our return to work. We started with groups using a shift schedule to keep density as low as possible, and gradually increased. Since we have not observed any instances of virus transmission within the Broad, we are confident that our security procedures are adequate. If you don’t have to sit on the couch, our approach for now is that you should still be at home.
Are tests carried out regularly among asymptomatic employees?
Yes, we have a regular testing program for those who come on site.
You do so many things, whether it’s new data platforms, polygenic heart attack risk scores, cancer work. What are the non-COVID things you want to spotlight in the ‘coming soon’ category?
One of these is the field of therapeutics and drug discovery. We see more and more large and small companies coming to the Broad with interest [in] how can we work together to reinvent a future around how drug discovery and development works.
The Broad will never become a pharmaceutical company – that’s not our ambition. But I hope The Broad can become a growing force in drug discovery and development, in partnership with the industry.
The second area revolves around data and data analysis, in particular machine learning. The biomedical world is bursting with data, and if all the data is disseminated in a haphazard manner, it is not particularly useful. The concept behind Terra [a Broad-Microsoft-Verily collaboration] is that having a mechanism to bring together useful data and useful tools lowers the threshold for researchers in the community – not just at the Broad, but around the world – to be able to analyze that data and to make sure are that we have proper data security and permissions in place.
And if we’ve organized this growing body of data in a way that’s analyzable, then the power of the emerging machine learning methods that are exploding on the scene right now becomes really exciting and important, and they have real potential.
That is one area where you will see the Broad become even more active, bringing together the computational community, machine learners, and those with a biology and medical background. I see huge potential in machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, but the way to get there is to confront that community of computer scientists with the community of biologists and clinicians, and decide together what the problems are that we really must resolve.
You recently expanded your campus. Do you think the density and activity level we saw before the pandemic will return? Worried about Kendall Square post-pandemic? It is now a ghost town.
The success of the Broad, and of biotech in the region, is absolutely tied to that density and that energy. I am convinced it will return after a pandemic. I think people recognize that there is value in that density and everything that comes from it.
At the same time, I think today’s broad and other organizations will learn and ask if we should be more open to thinking about additional ways and more flexible ways of working. I suspect the Broad doesn’t look exactly like it did before the pandemic. There is no doubt that after the pandemic, Kendall Square will remain a hive of information flows and energy and connections. That will be essential to the future growth and viability of Kendall Square, and to the region, even if it doesn’t look exactly like it did before the pandemic.
Pre-pandemic, it probably would have been hard to say the Broad would have a group leader in Silicon Valley or Seattle or Tel Aviv. Everyone was supposed to be in the building. It sounds like you are saying some of it can be re-assessed.
It’s too early to know what our fix will be, but we are definitely rethinking some of those assumptions [about where people live] so we can be flexible. And yet, I think a key measure of the Broad’s success has been its commitment to not having bench-based people and computational people in separate departments, but a space where the two are physically side by side.
Can you have freewheeling, rigorous scientific debates about Zoom the same as in a conference room?
You can do a good job, but it is no substitute for being personal.
Do you intend to speak and write about the role of science in society, as your predecessor often did? What is your message?
The work of the Broad Institute is not only to make discoveries within the walls of the Broad; it is to do that as a horizontal link between the local Boston community and beyond. I suspect you’ll hear more from me. At the moment my plate is quite full and my top priority is leading the Broad.
Scott Kirsner can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @RTLnews.