Ed Boyden wins 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

MIT researchers took home several awards last night at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize ceremony at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Edward Boyden, an associate professor of media arts and sciences, biological engineering, and brain and cognitive sciences, was one of five scientists honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, given for “transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.” He will receive $3 million for the award.

MIT physicists also contributed to a project that won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. That prize went to five experiments investigating the oscillation of subatomic particles known as neutrinos. More than 1,300 contributing physicists will share in the recognition for their work, according to the award announcement. Those physicists include MIT associate professor of physics Joseph Formaggio and his team, as well as MIT assistant professor of physics Lindley Winslow.

Larry Guth, an MIT professor of mathematics, was honored with the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, which is given to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work in mathematics. Liang Fu, an assistant professor of physics, was honored with the New Horizons in Physics Prize, which is awarded to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work in fundamental physics.

“By challenging conventional thinking and expanding knowledge over the long term, scientists can solve the biggest problems of our time,” said Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Facebook, and one of the prizes’ founders. “The Breakthrough Prize honors achievements in science and math so we can encourage more pioneering research and celebrate scientists as the heroes they truly are.”

Optogenetics

Boyden was honored for the development and implementation of optogenetics, a technique in which scientists can control neurons by shining light on them. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University professor who worked with Boyden to pioneer the technique, was also honored with one of the life sciences prizes.

Optogenetics relies on light-sensitive proteins, originally isolated from bacteria and algae. About 10 years ago, Boyden and Deisseroth began engineering neurons to express these proteins, allowing them to selectively stimulate or silence them with pulses of light. More recently, Boyden has developed additional proteins that are even more sensitive to light and can respond to different colors.

Scientists around the world have used optogenetics to reveal the brain circuitry underlying normal neural function as well as neurological disorders such as autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression.

Boyden is a member of the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Neutrino oscillations

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to five research projects investigating the nature of neutrinos: Daya Bay (China); KamLAND (Japan); K2K/T2K (Japan); Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (Canada); and Super-Kamiokande (Japan). Researchers with these experiments were recognized “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

Formaggio and his team at MIT have been collaborating on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) project since 2005. Research at the observatory, 2 kilometers underground in a mine near Sudbury, Ontario, demonstrated that neutrinos change their type — or “flavor” — on their way to Earth from the sun.

Winslow has been a collaborator on KamLAND, located in a mine in Japan, since 2001. Using antineutrinos from nuclear reactors, this experiment demonstrated that the change in flavor was energy-dependent. The combination of these results solved the solar neutrino puzzle and proved that neutrinos have mass.

The MIT SNO group has participated heavily on the analysis of neutrino data, particularly during that experiment’s final measurement phase. The MIT KamLAND group is involved with the next phase, KamLAND-Zen, which is searching for a rare nuclear process that if observed, would make neutrinos their own antiparticles.

Reaching new horizons

Guth, who will receive a $100,000 prize, was honored for his “ingenious and surprising solutions to long standing open problems in symplectic geometry, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis, and combinatorial geometry.”

Guth’s work at MIT focuses on combinatorics, or the study of discrete structures, and how sets of lines intersect each other in space. He also works in the area of harmonic analysis, studying how sound waves interact with each other.

Guth’s father, MIT physicist Alan Guth, won the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2015.

Fu will share a New Horizons in Physics Prize with two other researchers: B. Andrei Bernevig of Princeton University and Xiao-Liang Qi of Stanford University. The physicists were honored for their “outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics, especially involving the use of topology to understand new states of matter.”

Fu works on theories of topological insulators — a new class of materials whose surfaces can freely conduct electrons even though their interiors are electrical insulators — and topological superconductors. Such materials may provide insight into quantum physics and have possible applications in creating transistors based on the spin of particles rather than their charge.

Yesterday’s prize ceremony was hosted by producer/actor/director Seth MacFarlane; awards were presented by the prize sponsors and by celebrities including actors Russell Crowe, Hilary Swank, and Lily Collins. The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.

“Breakthrough Prize laureates are making fundamental discoveries about the universe, life, and the mind,” Yuri Milner said. “These fields of investigation are advancing at an exponential pace, yet the biggest questions remain to be answered.”

McGovern Institute awards prize to vision scientist Charles Gilbert

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today that Charles D. Gilbert of The Rockefeller University is the winner of the 2015 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The Prize is awarded annually by the McGovern Institute to recognize outstanding advances in any field of neuroscience.

“Charles Gilbert has been a pioneer in understanding the function of visual cortex,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and chair of the selection committee. “His work addresses fundamental questions about visual perception, and has also provided important insights into how the brain recovers from injury and degenerative disease.”

Gilbert is currently the Arthur and Janet Ross Professor and head of the laboratory of neurobiology at The Rockefeller University. He received his MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he later became an assistant professor before joining the Rockefeller faculty in 1983. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

While at Harvard, Gilbert began a longstanding collaboration with Torsten Wiesel, who shared the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work with David Hubel on the function of the visual cortex. Together with Wiesel, Gilbert described the lateral neuronal connections within the cortex, which are central to our current understanding of cortical function. The primary visual cortex contains a topographic map of the visual field that is transmitted from the retina, with each neuron responding to stimuli at a particular location in visual space, known as its receptive field. But as Gilbert’s work revealed, the cortex also contains an extensive network of lateral connections that allow neurons to respond not just to the stimuli in their primary receptive fields, but also to contextual information from other parts of the image. This is central to our ability to perceive large-scale features within the clutter of natural visual scenes.

Gilbert went on on to discover that these horizontal connections play an important role in the brain’s plasticity. If a blind patch is created on retina, the corresponding patch of cortex is initially unresponsive, but soon begins to respond to stimuli delivered to the surrounding part of the visual field, causing us to be unaware of any perceptual gap. Gilbert discovered the mechanism underlying this form of plasticity, demonstrating the anatomical growth of horizontal connections within the previously inactive patch of cortex and describing the intricate changes in connectivity that follow. These studies focused on the visual cortex, but similar circuits and mechanisms are thought to exist throughout the brain, and to underlie its ability to recover after damage or disease.

The plasticity of these horizontal connections is important not only for recovery after injury, but also for perceptual learning, a form of brain plasticity that persists throughout life. It has long been recognized that visual perceptual abilities (for example, the ability to do perceptual grouping of scene components) can improve with practice, and Gilbert has studied the neural basis of this phenomenon. He identified changes in the functional properties of cortical neurons that correlate with perceptual learning, and showed that these changes are seen only during the performance of the specific learned task, indicating that they are controlled by top-down influences such as attention and expectation that depend on behavioral context. This work has led to a new view of cortical neurons as ‘adaptive processors’ that can select task-relevant inputs through an interaction between top-down signals and local cortical connections.

The McGovern Institute will award the Scolnick Prize to Dr Gilbert on Friday March 20, 2015. At 4.00 pm he will deliver a lecture entitled “The Dynamic Brain,” to be followed by a reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (Building 46, Room 3002) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

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About the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience:
The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002 after holding Merck’s top research post for 17 years. Dr. Scolnick is now a core member of the Broad Institute, where he is chief scientist at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He also serves as a member of the McGovern Institute’s governing board. The prize, which is endowed through a gift from Merck to the McGovern Institute, consists of a $100,000 award, plus an inscribed gift. Previous winners are Huda Zoghbi (Baylor College of Medicine), Thomas Jessell (Columbia University), Roger Nicoll (University of California, San Francisco), Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller University), Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan (University of California, San Francisco), Jeremy Nathans (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Davis (Emory University), David Julius (University of California, San Francisco), Michael Greenberg (Harvard Medical School), Judith Rapoport (National Institute of Mental Health) and Mark Konishi (California Institute of Technology).

MIT researchers to win awards from the Society for Neuroscience

Three neuroscientists at MIT have been selected to receive awards from the Society for Neuroscience (SfN).

Tomaso Poggio, a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, will receive the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience; Feng Zhang, a member of the McGovern Institute and an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, will receive the Young Investigator Award; and Sung-Yon Kim, a Simons postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation at MIT, will receive the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience.
 
The awards will be presented during Neuroscience 2014, the SfN’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
 

The $25,000 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, supported by the Swartz Foundation, recognizes an individual who has produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience.

“Dr. Poggio’s contributions to the development of computational and theoretical models of the human visual system have served to advance our understanding of how human systems learn from experience,” said Carol Mason, president of SfN. “It is an honor to recognize him as a founder and driving force in the field of computational neuroscience.”

Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the director of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, develops computational models of the brain to understand human intelligence. Specifically, he has developed models that mimic the ways that humans learn to recognize objects, such as faces, and actions, such as motion — applications now present in digital cameras and some cars. Poggio is currently working to develop more complex models that mimic the forward as well as feedback signals that the human brain uses during visual recognition. The ultimate goal of this research is to better understand how the brain works and to apply this technology to build intelligent machines.


Young Investigator Award
 

The SfN has also named two winners of this year’s Young Investigator Award: Feng Zhang of MIT and Diana Bautista of the University of California at Berkeley.

The $15,000 award recognizes the outstanding achievements and contributions by a young neuroscientist who has recently received his or her advanced professional degree.

“Drs. Zhang and Bautista are two young neuroscientists who have demonstrated remarkable dedication to their work,” Mason said. “Their creative research is advancing their respective fields, and their commitment to helping other scientists succeed is an inspiration to us all.”

Zhang, who is also a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering, uses synthetic biology methods to study brain disease.
 
As a graduate student at Stanford University, Zhang was instrumental in advancing the development of optogenetic technology, which allows researchers to manipulate genetically modified neurons with light. More recently, Zhang was a leader in the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing – a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedical research, including the potential to treat human genetic disease.

Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience
 


The SfN will award the Donald B. Lindsley Prize to Sung-Yon Kim, a postdoc in Kwanghun Chung’s lab at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Supported by The Grass Foundation, the prize recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscience.
 
Kim, who earned his PhD at Stanford University, used optogenetics to study the brain circuits underlying anxiety.

“The Society is pleased to honor Dr. Kim’s groundbreaking research in the neuroanatomical basis of anxiety behavior,” said Mason. “His approach to behavioral neuroscience will likely have a broad and lasting impact on biology and medicine.”

Fifteen MIT scientists receive NIH BRAIN Initiative grants

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced their first round of BRAIN Initiative award recipients. Six teams and 15 researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were recipients.

Mriganka Sur, principal investigator at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Paul E. Newton Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) leads a team studying cortical circuits and information flow during memory-guided perceptual decisions. Co-principal investigators include Emery Brown, BCS professor of computational neuroscience and the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering; Kwanghun Chung, Picower Institute principal investigator and assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES); and Ian Wickersham, research scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and head of MIT’s Genetic Neuroengineering Group.

Elly Nedivi, Picower Institute principal investigator and professor in BCS and the Department of Biology, leads a team studying new methods for high-speed monitoring of sensory-driven synaptic activity across all inputs to single living neurons in the context of the intact cerebral cortex. Her co-principal investigator is Peter So, professor of mechanical and biological engineering, and director of the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center.

Ian Wickersham will lead a team looking at novel technologies for nontoxic transsynaptic tracing. His co-principal investigators include Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience in BCS; Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute and the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in BCS; and Kay Tye, Picower Institute principal investigator and assistant professor of neuroscience in BCS.

Robert Desimone will lead a team studying vascular interfaces for brain imaging and stimulation. Co-principal investigators include Ed Boyden, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, McGovern Institute, and departments of BCS and Biological Engineering; head of MIT’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group, and co-director of MIT’s Center for Neurobiological Engineering; and Elazer Edelman, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology in IMES and director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center. Collaborators on this project include: Rodolfo Llinas (New York University), George Church (Harvard University), Jan Rabaey (University of California at Berkeley), Pablo Blinder (Tel Aviv University), Eric Leuthardt (Washington University/St. Louis), Michel Maharbiz (Berkeley), Jose Carmena (Berkeley), Elad Alon (Berkeley), Colin Derdeyn (Washington University in St. Louis), Lowell Wood (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Xue Han (Boston University), and Adam Marblestone (MIT).

Ed Boyden will be co-principal investigator with Mark Bathe, associate professor of biological engineering, and Peng Yin of Harvard on a project to study ultra-multiplexed nanoscale in situ proteomics for understanding synapse types.

Alan Jasanoff, associate professor of biological engineering and director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, will lead a team looking at calcium sensors for molecular fMRI. Stephen Lippard, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry, is co-principal investigator.

In addition, Sur and Wickersham also received BRAIN Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Sur will focus on massive-scale multi-area single neuron recordings to reveal circuits underlying short-term memory. Wickersham, in collaboration with Li-Huei Tsai, Kay Tye, and Robert Desimone, will develop cell-type specific optogenetics in wild-type animals. Additional information about NSF support of the BRAIN initiative can be found at NSF.gov/brain.

The BRAIN Initiative, spearheaded by President Obama in April 2013, challenges the nation’s leading scientists to advance our sophisticated understanding of the human mind and discover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, and traumatic brain injury. The scientific community is charged with accelerating the invention of cutting-edge technologies that can produce dynamic images of complex neural circuits and illuminate the interaction of lightning-fast brain cells. The new capabilities are expected to provide greater insights into how brain functionality is linked to behavior, learning, memory, and the underlying mechanisms of debilitating disease. BRAIN was launched with approximately $100 million in initial investments from the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

BRAIN Initiative scientists are engaged in a challenging and transformative endeavor to explore how our minds instantaneously processes, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information. Their discoveries will unlock many of the remaining mysteries inherent in the brain’s billions of neurons and trillions of connections, leading to a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of many neurological and psychiatric conditions. Their findings will enable scientists and doctors to develop the groundbreaking arsenal of tools and technologies required to more effectively treat those suffering from these devastating disorders.

NIH awards initial $46 million for BRAIN Initiative research

The National Institutes of Health announced today its first wave of investments totaling $46 million in fiscal year 14 funds to support the goals of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. More than 100 investigators in 15 states and several countries will work to develop new tools and technologies to understand neural circuit function and capture a dynamic view of the brain in action. These new tools and this deeper understanding will ultimately catalyze new treatments and cures for devastating brain disorders and diseases that are estimated by the World Health Organization to affect more than one billion people worldwide. Six MIT projects were funded, including four projects led by McGovern Institute researchers.

“The human brain is the most complicated biological structure in the known universe. We’ve only just scratched the surface in understanding how it works — or, unfortunately, doesn’t quite work when disorders and disease occur,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “There’s a big gap between what we want to do in brain research and the technologies available to make exploration possible. These initial awards are part of a 12-year scientific plan focused on developing the tools and technologies needed to make the next leap in understanding the brain. This is just the beginning of an ambitious journey and we’re excited about the possibilities.”

Creating a wearable scanner to image the human brain in motion, using lasers to guide nerve cell firing, recording the entire nervous system in action, stimulating specific circuits with radio waves, and identifying complex circuits with DNA barcodes are among the 58 projects announced today. The majority of the grants focus on developing transformative technologies that will accelerate fundamental neuroscience research and include:

• classifying the myriad cell types in the brain
• producing tools and techniques for analyzing brain cells and circuits
• creating next-generation human brain imaging technology
• developing methods for large-scale recordings of brain activity
• integrating experiments with theories and models to understand the functions of specific brain circuits

“How do the billions of cells in our brain control our thoughts, feelings, and movements? That’s ultimately what the BRAIN Initiative is about,” said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. “Understanding this will greatly help us meet the rising challenges that brain disorders pose for the future health of the nation.”

Last year, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative as a large-scale effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. Four federal agencies — NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — stepped up to the “grand challenge” and committed more than $110 million to the Initiative for fiscal year 2014. Planning for the NIH component of the BRAIN initiative is guided by the long-term scientific plan, “BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision” that details seven high-priority research areas.

Later today, the White House is hosting a conference on the BRAIN Initiative where new Federal and private sector commitments will be unveiled in support of this ambitious and important effort.

“We are at a critical juncture for brain research, and these audacious projects are from some of the brightest researchers in neuroscience collaborating with physicists and engineers,” said Story Landis, Ph.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

For a list of all the projects, please visit: http://braininitiative.nih.gov/nih-brain-awards.htm

For more information about the BRAIN Initiative, please visit: http://www.nih.gov/science/brain/

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About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

Feng Zhang shares Gabbay Award for CRISPR research

Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of Umeå University have been awarded Brandeis University’s 17th Annual Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine.

The researchers are being honored for their work on the CRISPR/cas system, a genome editing technology that allows scientists to make precise changes to a DNA sequence — an advance that is expected to transform many areas of biomedical research and may ultimately form the basis of new treatments for human genetic disease.

Feng Zhang wins NSF’s Alan T. Waterman Award

The National Science Foundation (NSF) named Feng Zhang the 2014 recipient of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is NSF’s highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35 and funds his or her research in any field of science or engineering. Zhang’s research focuses on understanding how the brain works.

“It is a great pleasure to honor Feng Zhang with this award for his young, impressive career,” said NSF Director France Córdova. “It is exciting to support his continued fundamental research, which is certain to impact the field of brain research. Imagine a future free of schizophrenia, autism and other brain disorders that wreak havoc on individuals, families and society. Feng’s research moves us in that direction.”

Zhang seeks to understand the molecular machinery of brain cells through the development and application of innovative technologies. He created and is continuing to perfect tools that afford researchers precise control over biological activities occurring inside the cell. With these tools, researchers can deepen their understanding of how the genome works, and how it influences the development and function of the brain. Zhang also examines failures within the systems that cause disease.

Two different lines of fundamental research and technology development are helping him do that: optogenetics and genome engineering. With Edward Boyden and Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, he developed optogenetics to study brain circuits, a technique in which light is used to affect signaling and gene expression of neurons involved in complex behaviors. Zhang also developed the CRISPR system to enable new, cheaper, more effective ways to “edit” animal genomes–that is, to identify and cut a short DNA sequence underlying a disorder so that it may be deleted or substituted out for other genetic material. Although Zhang’s main area of focus is the brain, the potential applications of CRISPR technology extend well beyond neuroscience.

“This is an immensely exciting time for the field because of the tremendous potential of tools like CRISPR, which allows us to modify the genomes of mammalian cells,” Zhang said. “One of my long-term goals is to better understand the molecular mechanisms of brain function and identify new ways to treat devastating neurological disorders.”

Since high school, Zhang has devoted his time, energy and intellectual prowess to developing ways to study and repair the nervous system. Today, he is one of 11 core faculty members at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor with a joint appointment in MIT’s Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering.

Zhang is widely recognized for his pioneering work in optogenetics and genome editing. He shared the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize with Karl Deisseroth and Edward Boyden in 2012. In 2013, MIT Technology Review recognized him as a “pioneer” and one of its 35 Innovators Under 35; Popular Science magazine placed Zhang on its Brilliant 10, an annual list of the most promising scientific innovators. Nature also named him as one of the “ten people who mattered” in 2013 for his work on developing the CRISPR system for genome editing in mammalian cells.

The Waterman award will be presented to Zhang at an evening ceremony at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on May 6. At that event, the National Science Board will also present its 2014 Vannevar Bush award to mathematician Richard Tapia and Public Service awards to bioethicist Arthur Caplan and to the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships Program.

Plans are underway for Zhang to deliver a lecture at a meeting of the National Science Board at NSF and to meet with students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology during his visit this spring.

Patrick J. McGovern, 1937-2014

Patrick McGovern was born in 1937 in Queens, New York, and grew up in New York and Philadelphia. He became interested in the brain as a teenager, when he came across a book titled “Giant Brains, or Machines that Think” in the Philadelphia public library. As he recalled in an interview some 50 years later, “It was the first book that talked about computers and their role as an amplifier of the human mind,” and it sparked a lifelong interest in science and technology. In 1955 Pat was admitted to MIT, where he majored in biophysics. He studied neurophysiology, and recalls using a glass electrode to study electrical activity in tadpoles. He also became involved in student newspapers, and after graduating from MIT in the class of 1959, he was hired as an assistant editor for a new magazine, “Computers and Automation,” founded by Ed Berkeley, the author of the book that had so intrigued him ten years earlier.

After four years as a magazine editor, Pat left to found his own company, now known as International Data Group (IDG), which under his leadership grew to become the world’s foremost publisher of computer-related news, information and research. IDG today is a multi-billion-dollar business, with 2013 revenues of over $3.5 billion. The story of Pat’s career at IDG has been often told, and his business accomplishments have been recognized with many honors, including lifetime achievement awards from American Business Media and from the Magazine Publishers of America. Yet despite his success and his imposing physical presence, Pat retained a modest demeanor and never cultivated the trappings of great wealth. Instead, he focused his energies on leadership of the company (of which he remained chairman until the time of his death) and increasingly in his later years, on his philanthropic priorities.

His career and fortune were made in computer technology, but never lost sight of his early dream to understand the brain, which he often described as the world’s most complex computer. When he studied neurophysiology at MIT in the 1950s, the tools were not adequate to the enormous challenge of understanding how the human brain works, but by the 1990s, technological progress had been so dramatic that the field had been transformed almost beyond recognition. A scientific understanding of the brain, while still a daunting challenge, was no longer within the realm of science fiction, but was a real prospect for the future.

Pat’s dream was shared by his wife Lore Harp McGovern, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose interests included healthcare, education and hi-tech. In the late 1990s they decided that the time was right to establish a new institute for brain research, and after consultations with many leading scientists and universities, they decided that the new institute would be at MIT.

Pat and Lore had both been longstanding MIT supporters; Pat was a member of the MIT Corporation, and Lore was chair of the Board of Associates at the affiliated Whitehead Institute. But they always emphasized that their choice of MIT was not simply a matter of loyalty to Pat’s alma mater. They felt that MIT was the right choice because of its alignment with their vision of a multidisciplinary, outward-looking institute that would engage the widest possible range of scientific talents in support of its mission to understand the brain. One goal was to understand the basis of brain disorders and to lay the foundation for new treatments for conditions such as psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases – a goal that Pat and Lore considered vitally important, given the enormous suffering and economic costs that are inflicted by these disorders. But their vision was not confined to disease research; they also understood the brain to be the source of our humanity, our creative achievements and our conflicts, and they saw the possibility that understanding these things in scientific terms could transform the world for the better.

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research was formally established in 2000, with a commitment of $350 million from Pat and Lore, one of the largest philanthropic gifts in the history of higher education. Nobel laureate and Institute Professor Phillip A. Sharp, was named founding director, and Robert Desimone succeeded Sharp as director in 2004. In the fall of 2005, the McGovern Institute moved into spacious facilities in MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, one of the most distinctive landmarks on the MIT campus and among the largest neuroscience research buildings in the world.

The McGovern Institute has continued to thrive since it moved to its new home, expanding in size and scope as it has hired new faculty and built new laboratories. Most importantly, it has produced a steady stream of discoveries about the working of the brain, in areas ranging from the genetic control of brain development to the neural basis of human thought and emotion. This progress was deeply gratifying to Pat and Lore, who visited regularly to attend the institute’s board meetings and scientific events, mingling with faculty and researchers and engaging deeply in discussions of their new findings. Throughout his life, Pat retained an extraordinary ability to absorb new information, and researchers were frequently impressed at his ability to cite detailed facts and figures about the brain. He was a tireless advocate for the institute and its mission, hosting many visits and tours, and inspiring others to follow his philanthropic example. He was, and Lore remains, an enormous source of inspiration and encouragement to the researchers at the institute.

Throughout Pat’s business career, his vision was global, and he took great pride in the fact that IDG was one of the first Western companies to establish a business presence in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution. It is thus fitting that Pat and Lore’s philanthropic vision also extended to China; since 2011, three new IDG/McGovern Institutes have been established in Beijing, at Tsinghua University, Peking (“Beida”) University and Beijing Normal University.

Like the McGovern Institute at MIT, the new institutes in China are focused on fundamental research in neuroscience as well as translational work on disease applications. Pat always saw brain disorders as global problems that required global solutions, and one of his greatest hopes was that the new institutes would help accelerate the international cooperation that he saw as essential to the ultimate goal of understanding the human brain in health and disease.

Pat’s wife Lore has been a full partner throughout the McGovern Institute’s 14-year history, serving on the governing board of the institute along with Pat and his daughter Elizabeth McGovern. All of us at the institute offer our deepest condolences to Lore, to their four children, and to all of Pat’s family members and friends. He will be greatly missed.

See below for a photo gallery of Pat McGovern.

Photos: Justin Knight

McGovern Institute to honor neurogenetics researcher Huda Zoghbi

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today that Huda Y. Zoghbi, of Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital, is the winner of the 2014 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The Prize is awarded annually by the McGovern Institute to recognize outstanding advances in the field of neuroscience.

“Huda Zoghbi has been a pioneer in the study of human genetic disease,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and chair of the selection committee. “Her work has provided fundamental insights into the mechanisms of hereditary neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases, and has pointed the way to new treatments for these disorders.”

Zoghbi studied medicine in her native Lebanon and later in the US, where she specialized in pediatric neurology. Following her residency she trained as a molecular geneticist with Arthur Beaudet at Baylor College of Medicine, where she became a faculty member in 1988. She is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Zoghbi’s first major scientific contribution was the identification in 1993 of the gene responsible for spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1), a progressive neurodegenerative disease with an unusual pattern of inheritance. In collaboration with Harry Orr at the University of Minnesota, Zoghbi showed that SCA1, like Huntington’s disease, is caused by a pathological expansion of a repeated three-nucleotide sequence. The more times this is repeated, the earlier the onset of disease and the more severe the symptoms. The number of repeats can increase from one generation to the next, meaning that children are often more severely affected than the parent. Zoghbi continues to study SCA1, and her recent work has focused on identifying genetic factors that slow the progression of the disease, a strategy that she hopes will also be applicable to other neurodegenerative disorders.

Zoghbi is perhaps best known for her pioneering work on Rett syndrome, a genetic neurological disease that affects young girls (males with the condition usually die in infancy). Girls born with the disease develop normally for one or two years, but then begin to show progressive loss of motor skills, speech, and other cognitive abilities.

Zoghbi first encountered children with Rett syndrome during her residency, and decided to search for its genetic cause. This was a challenging task; the disease was not widely recognized at the time and was often misdiagnosed, and family studies were difficult because the majority of cases were caused by isolated sporadic mutations. Zoghbi persisted despite these challenges, and after a 16-year search, she succeeded in identifying the Rett gene in 1999. This discovery provided a definitive genetic diagnosis for the condition, and also opened the door to a biological understanding and a search for treatment. Zoghbi demonstrated that Rett syndrome is caused by deficiency in a protein called MeCP2, which binds methylated DNA and regulates the expression of many other genes. The gene lies on the X chromosome, and in females one of the two X chromosomes is randomly inactivated in each cell; thus each patient with the Rett mutation has a different pattern of healthy and mutant cells, explaining some of the variability of Rett symptoms.

Identification of the Rett gene allowed researchers to make equivalent mutations in mouse models, which develop progressive neurological symptoms strikingly similar to those of human patients. This in turn laid the groundwork for further studies by Zoghbi and many other labs, and to the development of new therapeutic strategies that are now undergoing clinical trials.

The implications of this work extend beyond Rett syndrome (a relatively rare condition). Many Rett patients show symptoms of autism, and one hope is that understanding these symptoms may lead to new treatments that will be effective not only for people with Rett syndrome but also for other more common cases of autism. Zoghbi’s recent work has focused on identifying the cell types and brain circuits that are responsible for the autistic-like behaviors of the mouse Rett model, which may represent promising targets for future therapeutic intervention.

In addition to running her own laboratory, Zoghbi is the founding director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including election to both the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.
The McGovern Institute will award the Scolnick Prize to Dr. Zoghbi on Wednesday April 30, 2014. At 4:00 pm she will deliver a lecture entitled “A neural tipping point: MeCP2 and neuropsychiatric disorders,” to be followed by a reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (building 46, room 3002) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

About the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience:
The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002 after holding Merck’s top research post for 17 years. Dr. Scolnick is now a core member of the Broad Institute, where he is chief scientist at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He also serves as a member of the McGovern Institute’s governing board. The prize, which is endowed through a gift from Merck to the McGovern Institute, consists of a $100,000 award, plus an inscribed gift. Previous winners are Thomas Jessell (Columbia University), Roger Nicoll (University of California, San Francisco), Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller University), Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan (University of California, San Francisco), Jeremy Nathans (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Davis (Emory University), David Julius (University of California, San Francisco), Michael Greenberg (Harvard Medical School), Judith Rapoport (National Institute of Mental Health) and Mark Konishi (California Institute of Technology).