"That beats Moore's Law hands down, " says Eric Lander, head of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, funded by billionaire Eli Broad.

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And in particular, I want to thank two outstanding MIT professors, Eric Lander, a person you just heard from, Ernie Moniz, for their service on my council of advisors on science and technology.

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As another example, Venter points to Eric Lander , who heads the Genome Center at the Whitehead Institute (affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and is often seen as Venter's chief rival.

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They enlisted the help of several scientists, including Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who went on to become a leading light in the effort to sequence the human genome.

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For instance, MIT's Eric Lander founded Millennium Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: MLNM - news - people ) in 1993, but that didn't stop him from being a major force in the academic effort to map the human genome.

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Eric Lander , who played a pivotal role in mapping the human genome and now heads the Broad Institute, says the gift is about "really empowering a generation of young scientists to think specifically about getting to the heart of diseases" including cancer, metabolic diseases like diabetes, and infection.

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Eric S. Lander of The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard topped the list of most influential researchers for the second year straight, recording 14 Hot Papers in 2011.

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