Letter from the Director

This past July marked four years since I returned to Whitehead Institute to serve as director. Recently, the Institute’s board of directors appointed me to a second five year term beginning in 2025, which has prompted me to reflect on the past four years and to ponder what the future may hold.

 When I began, in the summer of 2020, the world was in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. The disease’s physical toll, coupled with economic dislocation and political turmoil marked the period. Our institute pulled together as a community and together we forged a path to safely keep our science moving and spirit intact. 

 Today, looking forward, I could not be more excited. Our now 42-year path of discovery — broadly defined by Jack Whitehead and David Baltimore as uncovering fundamental principles in developmental biology — has brought us organically to our new scientific vision, Renewal and Resilience. Guided by this vision, we strive to understand how organisms perform the fundamental tasks of life. We’re asking questions such as: “How do organisms replenish their cells and tissues?” “How do they reproduce?” “And how do they respond to challenges like disease and climate change?”

 Renewal and Resilience encompasses the breadth of research conducted by our principal investigators. Their work ranges from exploring how our germ cells renew and replenish our genetic material to tracing the effects of hibernation and torpor on aging; from learning how certain species regenerate organs and functions to understanding the genomics underlying sex differences in health and disease; and from spurring immune cells to fight cancer to developing more productive and resilient food crop plants.

Whitehead Institute scientists are extraordinarily well-positioned to address these important challenges because we are guided by an ethos of science without limits: a commitment to multidisciplinary, foundational biology fueled by curiosity, creativity, and the courage to take on intellectual risk in pursuit of discovery.

 Not bound to a particular research area or disease focus, our researchers  are nimble, free to pursue the big questions. They let their interests evolve and draw from any area of biology that can advance their investigations. Indeed, embracing science without limits in an institutional sense, we leverage our affiliation with the world-class expertise of our colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and we pursue collaborations with researchers around the world.

 Whitehead’s strong basic science approach drives a mechanistic understanding of biological processes that is crucial to understanding health and disease at its most elemental levels — and that is essential for reconstituting the complexity with which organisms function. We believe that understanding this complexity is critical for identifying the causes of disease and developing evidence-based therapies. 

 I am proud of all that Whitehead Institute has accomplished thus far. And I’m enthusiastic about the limitless science our investigators will pursue in the years to come.

Ruth Lehmann