McGovern Institute for Brain Research welcomed

Barely 30 months after the official groundbreaking ceremony, MIT officially opened the McGovern Institute for Brain Research on Friday with a celebration featuring personalities from science, politics, and entertainment.

Even by MIT standards, the Institute is breathtaking in terms of its architecture, size, and mission. The institute was created by the largest philanthropic gift in MIT history — $350 million over 20 years — courtesy of Patrick J. McGovern and his wife, Lore Harp McGovern. Patrick McGovern is the founder of IDG, the publisher of Bio-IT World, and an MIT alumnus.

The opening celebration was marked by speeches from Senator John Kerry, NBC News’ Jane Pauley, Nobel laureates Eric Kandel and Philip Sharp, and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe.

The institute is “the realization of a dream [the McGoverns] worked so hard for these past five years,” said McGovern Institute director Robert Desimone. Senator John Kerry called the event “a celebration of generosity, of vision, and of possibilities in the future.”

The institute will house more than 500 staff, making it one of, if not the largest neuroscience centers in the world. (The building complex also hosts the Picower Institute for Learning & Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.) McGovern said his goals were threefold: First, to improve communication to resolve conflict. Second, to understand how the brain processes information to improve education and learning. And third, the study of mental illness and brain disease, the largest cause of disability in the United States, costing $500 billion each year and great personal suffering.

Director Desimone noted that mental illness affects 450 million people. The statistics are sobering: Each year, 1 million people commit suicide, 150 million suffer from depression, 25 million from schizophrenia, and 38 million from epilepsy.

Peace and harmony

A beaming Patrick McGovern welcomed hundreds of guests into the spectacular sky-lit atrium of the institute, as well as “tens of thousands of people watching in China in prime time,” courtesy of a live webcast.

McGovern recalled his early fascination with the brain growing up in Philadelphia. He assembled “a computer that played an unbeatable game of tic-tac-toe.” The ensuing publicity led to an MIT scholarship. Realizing that the task of studying or modeling a brain with 3 billion neurons and 3 trillion connections, or synapses, was beyond the tools of the time, McGovern founded an information technology publishing company, IDG.

In traveling around the world, McGovern said he and his wife noted how similar human nature is from country to country. And yet people of all nationalities “are suspicious of people across geographic and political boundaries.” Improving communication and understanding could lead to “a more peaceful, harmonious world,” McGovern said.

In the mid 1990s, McGovern’s advisory board selected seven possible sites to host a brain institute: UCSD, UCSF, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Columbia, and MIT. “MIT won on its merits,” McGovern assured the audience. His wife Lore joked that “some universities prefer dead donors, but we want to participate in this journey of discovery.”

Collaboration and communication

The McGoverns praised the design of chief architect Charles Correa. “It is designed for maximum collaboration and line-of-sight communication,” said Patrick McGovern, pointing out the Portuguese marble that reflects light, producing a spectrum of color-tone changes as the sun moves across the massive skylight.

Desimone said the institute would be a center of “systems neuroscience,” a “molecules-to-mind research focus” that will concentrate on three broad areas: perception, cognition, and action, using state-of-the-art imaging technology, animal models, and computational neuroscience.

McGovern said that when the history of the 21st century is written, he hoped that the quality of life would be improved because of the study of the brain and learning, and that the McGovern Institute played a role in that progress.

Guest speakers

A procession of guest speakers paid tribute to the McGoverns and the future fruits of the institute. Founding institute director and Nobel laureate Philip Sharp was presented with a framed portrait that will hang in the institute lobby.

Bob Metcalfe likened the Internet to the brain because of its massive complexity and layering. “I have two teenagers. There’s something going on in their brains I desperately need to understand,” Metcalfe quipped. Metcalfe is the inventor of the Ethernet, which he said “provided the plumbing for the Internet, which provides the plumbing for the World Wide Web, which in turn provides the plumbing for Google!”

Nobel laureate Eric Kandel said, “The next century will be for the biology of the mind what the last century was for the biology of the gene.”

Jane Pauley, the NBC News TV personality, poignantly discussed her “belated brush with bipolar.” As she discusses in her autobiography Sky Writing, Pauley is taking lithium to manage bipolar disorder III, which afflicted her four years ago after steroid treatment for a serious case of hives. “Until I joined the club, I didn’t know it was so big,” said Pauley. But she said, “We are close to a tipping point in public attitudes to mental illness.”

MIT President and neuroscientist Susan Hockfield it was “a great day for all those around the world who will benefit from the work that is certain to be done here.”

She hailed the design of the center for the grace of the laboratories, the sense of communities, providing a sense of inspiration, “an urban oasis of light and space that simply makes the spirit soar.” She also predicted that the other MIT institutes surrounding the McGovern Institute, including the Picower, the Whitehead, and the Broad, would provide “synergies that will amplify this investment many fold.”

The final presentation was from Senator John Kerry. The Senator took a few political jibes, including this: “Researchers have found a man who uses only the right side of his brain. His name is Judge Alito.” He called the McGovern Institute “a place to take America to the next level — perhaps even shed light on what happened to [former Red Sox general manager] Theo Epstein.”

But between the jokes, Kerry delivered a stinging rebuke to the “short-sighted period of American experience in which support for science is withheld, and facts are ignored, skewed and distorted.” Science itself is under attack, Kerry said. He cited “funding priorities, the casual dismissal of evidence-based research, the refusal to listen to what the earth is trying to tell us … federal boards being staffed by partisans, constant political interference, and ideological intervention in stem cell research.”

“It is long since time to make America a reality-based community again,” Kerry said to warm applause. “The consequences for our national security and economic prosperity will be profound and lasting.”

NOTE: Update adds further institute information to graph five.