Genome sequencing pioneer: How biology entered the information age

Eric Lander

Nobel Dialogue Week

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN—Eric Lander was one of the leaders behind the effort to sequence the human genome. He has also continued to work on various follow-up projects through his involvement with the Broad Institute, a leading sequencing center. So, Lander makes an excellent choice to provide some perspective about how the growing availability of genomes has driven the biological sciences over the last decade. He did just that at a Nobel Week Dialogue talk.

But Lander didn't stop at ten years. Instead, he backed up all the way to the start of the 20th century and ran through the history of biology since. His reasoning was that it can take decades for the impact of scientific discoveries to be clear. And, according to Lander, the story parallels that of the 20th century as a whole, the rise of the information age. Information was a theme that pervaded the rest of his talk, and Lander blamed life itself. "Life was fundamentally about information."

Biology reaches the information age

At the end of the 1800s, vitalism—the idea that life had features that were distinct from the rest of the physical world—was still popular. It was the parallel progress in genetics and biochemistry that helped bring vitalism to a close. It took until the 1940s for the two fields to overlap, as researchers started to study the genetics of biochemical pathway and the biochemistry of heritable material. This is when the central role of DNA became clear. And that's what inspired Watson and Crick (plus a number of others) to think that understanding the structure of DNA would be critical.