History
The MSI was founded in June, 1996 by Dr. Sydney Brenner.
Dr. Brenner is widely known for his ability to identify important
avenues for the future development of biology. He received
a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his contributions towards discoveries
about how genes regulate organ growth and the process of
programmed cell death. He understood that a key challenge
for biological sciences in the first decade of the 21st century
would be to distill knowledge and understanding from the
surplus of data produced by new observation- and computation-based
technologies.
In 1997, Dr. Roger Brent, who had developed a similar vision,
joined the Institute. The MSI moved toward the goal
of using genomic data to predict the quantitative behavior
of biological systems and devising the necessary experimental
methods and computational tools to gain sufficient knowledge
of the current state of living systems in order to understand
mechanisms and predict outcomes.
In early 1998, the Institute moved operations from San Diego
to a new lab space in downtown Berkeley, California as an
independent, nonprofit research institute aiming to weave
physics, engineering, computer science, and mathematics together
with biology, genetics and chemistry to enable precise, quantitative,
prediction of the behaviors of biological systems. Additional
and explicit social goals of the Institute are to encourage
young researchers to independently explore new ideas and
to nurture a free and innovative scientific environment beyond
the constraints imposed by conventional academic, corporate,
and government organizations, and to gain experience relevant
for more ambitious interdisciplinary biology driven research
projects later this century.
In June 2001, Dr. Brenner stepped down, and, Dr. Brent became
Director and President of the Institute.
In July 2002, MSI was designated a Center of Excellence
in Genomic Sciences (CEGS) by the National Human Genome Research
Institute (NHGRI), a division of the National Institutes
of Health (NIH). Today, MSI consists of a core group of Ph.D.
Research Fellows drawn from biology, physics, computer science,
engineering, and mathematics.
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