INGEN a great example of collaborative excellence

By Myles Brand, President of Indiana University

How realistic that view has ever been is open to question. Each scientist builds on the progress of others. But today, as scientific projects become increasingly complex, it is even more outdated. Gifted, hard-working researchers still are at the center of scientific and medical progress. But it takes collaboration with a first-rate organization to produce optimum results.

The Lilly Endowment’s $105 million grant to Indiana University for the Indiana Genomics Initiative (INGEN) is a great example of such a collaboration. With the largest single grant it has ever awarded (and by far the largest one that IU has ever received), the endowment is making a huge investment in the economic and educational prospects of this state. This will help Indiana diversify its economy, adding to its existing strengths in biomedical fields; it will provide state-of-the art opportunities for our students. That says positive things about Indiana’s future.

For the Lilly Endowment to choose IU for this unprecedented grant says great things about this institution. Decoding the genome—the map of the basic building blocks of human genetic material—has required more than a decade of work by an international group of scientists. Genomics will help us decipher the secrets hidden there and will transform our ability to cure diseases and improve health.

Building on what these scientists have accomplished will require an equally comprehensive effort. Through its approval of this funding, the endowment clearly states its belief that IU is up to this enormous and exciting challenge. I, of course, heartily agree.

We have outstanding medical researchers in the School of Medicine in Indianapolis. But that only begins to explain the IU resources that must come together university-wide to make this initiative successful.

The INGEN initiative will focus on research areas that IUB scientists have pioneered and continue to lead. It is worth noting that all of the research proposed by INGEN is the intellectual heritage of work conducted on the Bloomington campus by Nobel Prize laureates Hermann Muller and Salvador Luria, and their Nobel Prize-winning student, James D. Watson.

This initiative will draw on the preeminent research programs on Drosophila in the IUB Department of Biology and the national and international facilities associated with them—the national stock center and the FlyBase bioinformatics project. Similarly, the science and technology of proteomics—the study of proteins and organism produces—has been driven by discoveries made in the IUB Department of Chemistry.

In short, the INGEN project represents a new era of collaboration between the medical school and IUB, and we expect that collaboration to yield great dividends to science and to the state.

The Regenstrief Institute, a leader in medical informatics, is also an important building block in this effort. So, too, is our information technology expertise. To decipher the interactions of the three billion units of DNA that determine a person’s biological makeup, researchers must store and analyze massive amounts of data.

Exploring the vast implications of genomics requires something more as well. We must examine its ethical aspects, concerns raised about privacy, safety, regulation and testing. The grant provides for a Center for Bioethics to allow scientists and ethics scholars to study these issues.

“Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” That sentiment was expressed by a great inventor of another age, Alexander Graham Bell. It is even more true today. I’m delighted that IU will be such an important part of the cooperative effort to open up this astonishing frontier of knowledge.