I contacted Golub for a Zoom interview of his home in Newton. This was his first interview since he was appointed to the post. Our conversation has been edited for a long time.
How did you find out that Eric Lander was appointed White House Scientific Adviser?
It all happened quickly because things work in government. I think it’s really great for the country, and Eric is really the person to do it. He has such a vision and ability to get things done.
Was it a foregone conclusion that you would replace him?
This was a discussion that the board had to conduct first. But yes, as a co-founder of Broad, who has been there since its inception, was the head of scientific officers and in the executive leadership team, it was not shocking when I was appointed to the role.
What changes to the research agenda and the work you plan to do in the post-Lander era?
It’s worth stepping back and taking a little perspective on where we’re coming from, because I think it indicates where we’re going. The earliest days of the Broad were deeply rooted in genomics – the technical aspects of making maps of the human genome – because it was the work needed to lay the foundation for the field.
For the past 16 years, efforts have been made to deepen biology and deepen our connections with medicine and hospitals. We are going to double these directions – deepen our connections with our local hospitals, deepen our commitment to therapeutic work, apply new approaches to biology and chemistry to the discovery of drugs, and deepen our connections with the industry in this regard. Much of the work that needs to be done will take place at the intersection of academia and the private sector, where together we face really important issues.
How were you involved in the COVID-19 testing at Broad?
I see the COVID testing as an excellent example of Broad’s philosophy that it should address the key challenges we face, and that it should be organized and have a culture that allows it to be fast, so that it can respond to those who face the most important challenges. Years ago, the main challenge was ‘Let’s find out how to sequence the human genome’, and if there is a new sequencing technology available on Monday, you should be able to respond on Tuesday. COVID is another example of this. Our culture and our organization have enabled us to adapt quickly. What was needed was a very high throughput, available, ideally cheap genomic testing. We were completely ready to do that.
It looks like you might be working from home. Do you have a regular schedule to enter the building?
Like many Broadies, I spend a lot of time working from home. My current schedule comes in about two days a week. I still spend a lot of time on Zoom, even though I’m in the building. But it’s good to be at Broad and see the institute come to life again. Our laboratories are now fully functional, everyone is back, the pace of work is back and the energy is back – even though many of the offices are still empty. People who are not at the [lab] sofa is largely at home, as it should be. We were deliberately conservative, but data-driven, in our return to work. We started with groups using a shift schedule to keep the density as low as possible, and gradually increased. As no cases of virus transmission have been observed within the Broad, we feel confident that our security procedures are adequate. If you do not have to be at the bank, our approach so far is that you should still be at home.
Are asymptomatic employees tested regularly?
Yes, for people who come on site, we have a regular testing program.
There are such a huge amount of things you do, whether it’s new data platforms, polygenic points for the risk of a heart attack, cancer. What are the non-COVID things you want to highlight in the ‘coming soon’ category?
One is the field of therapy and drug discovery. We are increasingly seeing large and small companies coming to Broad with interest [in] how can we work together to re-imagine a future on how drug discovery and development works?
The Broad will never become a drug company – that’s not our goal. But I hope the Broad can be a growing force in the discovery and development of drugs, in partnership with the industry.
The second area revolves around data and data analysis – especially machine learning. The biomedical world is exploding with data, and if all the data is scattered in a random way, it may not be particularly useful. The concept behind Terra [a Broad-Microsoft-Verily collaboration] is that the fact that it is a mechanism to bring together useful data and useful tools, lowers the barrier for researchers in the community – not only broadly, but also around the world – to be able to analyze the data, and to make sure we have the right data security and permissions in place.
And if we organize this growing amount of data in such a way that it is decomposable, then the power of the emerging machine learning methods that are now exploding on the scene becomes very exciting and important and has real potential.
This is an area where Broad will become even more active, bringing together the computer community, machine learners and people from biology and medical backgrounds. I see enormous potential in machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, but the path to getting there brings the community of computer scientists together with the community of biologists and clinicians, and decides together what the problems are that we really need to solve. .
You have recently expanded your campus. Do you think the density and level of activity we saw before the pandemic will return? Are you worried about Kendall Square, post-pandemic? It’s a ghost town now.
The success of the Broad, and the biotechnology in the region, is absolutely related to the density and the energy. I am confident that it will return after the pandemic. I think people realize that there is value in that density and everything out of it.
At the same time, I think the Broad and other organizations are going to learn from this moment and ask if we should be more open to thinking of additional ways and more flexible ways of working. I suspect at the Broad it will not look exactly like the pre-pandemic. There is no doubt that Kendall Square will remain a hive of information flow and energy and connections to the pandemic. This is going to be essential for the future growth and viability of Kendall Square, and for the region, even if it does not look exactly like the pre-pandemic.
Pre-pandemic, it would probably be hard to say that Broad would have a group leader in Silicon Valley or Seattle or Tel Aviv. Everyone was expected to be in the building. It sounds like you are saying that some of it could be reconsidered.
It’s too early to know what our solution will be, but we’ll definitely re-examine some of these assumptions. [about where people live] so that we can be flexible. And yet I think an important measure of Broad’s success was a commitment not to have people on the bench and computer people not in separate sections, but to have a space where the two are physically next to each other.
Can you conduct voluntary, rigorous scientific debates on Zoom, the same as in a conference room?
You can do decent work, but it’s no substitute for being personal.
Do you intend to talk and write about the role of science in society, as your predecessor regularly did? What is your message?
The job of the Broad Institute is not just to make discoveries within the walls of the Broad; it is to do so as a horizontal connection in the local Boston community and beyond. I suspect you will hear more from me. Right now, my board is pretty full, and my top priority is to lead the Broad.
Scott Kirsner can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.