Billionaire philanthropists Wendy and Eric Schmidt announced Thursday they are giving $150 million to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to launch and endow a research center that combines biology and computer science into a new scientific discipline aimed at improving human health.
Another billionaire couple, Eli and Edythe Broad, announced they are matching the Schmidts’ donation and giving $150 million through their Broad Foundations for the new center. The Broads helped start the institute in 2003 and later endowed it with a $400 million gift in 2008. It has since become one of the major forces in the global field of genetics research, and their latest donation brings the Broads’ giving to the institute to $1 billion, all of which has been unrestricted, said a Broad Foundations spokeswoman.
The two couples are not strangers. Eric Schmidt has served with Eli Broad on the Broad Institute’s Board of Directors since 2012 and has worked with Eli Broad, who is also on the board. The Schmidts are also said to have been impressed with the Broads’ approach to philanthropy, and especially their creation of the institute.
A spokeswoman for the Schmidts said the creation of the new center grew out of conversations the Schmidts had with the geneticist Eric Lander — who led the Broad Institute until his recent appointment by President Biden as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy — and the computational biologist, Aviv Regev, a former chairwoman of the faculty at the Broad Institute.
While a primary goal is to develop new drugs and other treatments to diagnose, treat, and ultimately prevent disease, a big part of the new Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center’s work will be aimed at better understanding biological processes and how cells communicate with each other.
To understand those processes, researchers at the center will seek to harness mountains of biological data that now exist and will use highly advanced computer technologies to read and analyze that information in ways not previously possible.
“We are at this perfect moment in human history, if you think about it, to be able to leap into this next new world offered by all these technologies. It’s incredibly exciting; it’s also fraught because it has to be done so carefully,” said Wendy Schmidt in a video about the donation.
The machine learning or artificial intelligence that would be key to the new research center’s work present powerful possibilities but also grave concerns. When combined with human biology, the two disciplines have the potential to uncover massive new scientific discoveries that could benefit humans in new and positive ways. But these technologies could also be weaponized if they got into the wrong hands. And, as has become painfully apparent in recent years, technologies like artificial intelligence can act with the same racial and other biases as the humans who developed the technologies.
She said the center has been created with ethics and equity in mind “because if we’re going to develop wonderful tools, we want to develop them for everyone and in a way that protects people,” she said.
Collaboration With Scholars and Business
The center will connect Broad Institute researchers from both Harvard and MIT with those from other entities, including the Mila-Quebec AI Institute, European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems, Oxford Big Data Institute, and Alan Turing Institute, as well as clinicians and researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the Geisinger Medical Center.
Researchers from the biopharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca, Genentech, and Novartis will also be involved, as will those from technology and scientific companies like DeepMind, Google Research, and Microsoft. (Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then later executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet.)
The Schmidts are funding the new center through Schmidt Futures, an arm of their Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, which is one of several of the couples’ giving vehicles.
The Schmidts have been generous philanthropists for many years, but it is only in the last several years that they have been more public about their giving. In 2019, they pledged $1 billion to nonprofits, with much of it aimed at increasing the number and types of people who pursue public-service careers and helping young people from low-income families gain access to education and other resources.
Last year they gave nearly $500 million to the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and Schmidt Ocean Institute. The couple, whose net worth has been estimated at $18.5 billion by Forbes, have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors three times since 2009.
