Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

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Night shot of the Whitehead Institute (left building)

The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research , English Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research , is a non-profit research and educational institution in Cambridge , Massachusetts . Founded in 1982, it is independent of the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in terms of funding, administration and research orientation, but the members of the institute are professors in the Department of Biology at MIT. The institute is named after the industrialist and philanthropist Edwin C. Whitehead , who raised a total of $ 135 million from his private fortune based on economic activities in the field of medical diagnostics, including $ 35 million for building the institute and annual payments of five million US dollars for maintenance.

The Institute for Scientific Information described the Whitehead Institute in 1990 based on the publications of its employees as the best research institution in the world in the field of molecular biology and genetics . It is one of the world's leading institutions in the field of genomics and had a share of around one third of the data, the largest contribution to a single device, much to the decoding of the human genome by the Human Genome Project involved. To currently 15 members of the faculty of the Whitehead Institute ( Members ) are among eight members of the Academy of Sciences of the United States . In addition, the up to 25 research group leaders include five to seven junior researchers called Fellows who, after completing their doctorate, have the opportunity to conduct independent research without completing a traditional postdoc phase . The number of other employees is around 300, including around 200 scientific staff.

The institute's main research areas are cancer research , developmental and cell biology , neurobiology , infection biology as well as genetics and genomics . The annual budget in 2006 was around 46 million US dollars, of which around 46 percent was state project funding and 15 percent was other funding.

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