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Damian Young’s laboratory at Harvard is a fun place to visit – if you can find it. The lab is housed in the depths of one of the interconnected buildings on Oxford Street, and getting to it requires navigating the twists and turns of many hallways. The lab itself is filled with all kinds of equipment for synthesizing chemical compounds – including an apparatus called a solvent dispensing system, which a chemist can use to decant aliquots of reagents the way a bartender might pour whatever is on tap.

Many people know the Broad Institute as a leader in the study of human genetics. But did you know that as part of this work our researchers look into the genomes of other animals? The following video highlights the work Broad scientists are doing to unravel cancer genes found in the purebred Golden Retriever. The goal of the project is not only to find genes that cause cancer in these dogs but also to make a link with similar cancer-related genes in people. 

On a drizzly Monday afternoon, clinical pathologist Chin-Lee Wu sits down at an unoccupied desk a few feet away from one of the Broad’s bustling laboratories and gets ready to examine over 100 slides beneath a microscope. Chin-Lee is a surgical pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital where he specializes in urological cancers, including prostate, kidney, and bladder cancers. For the last three years, he has also served as a consultant pathologist for the Broad, peering at prepared slides of cancer samples and making sense of the cellular disarray.

Robert Flaumenhaft, a research investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, wants to understand a major cause of disease and death. His research lab studies platelets – circulating cells that play a key role in arterial thrombosis, in which a blood clot blocks the flow of blood through an artery potentially leading to a heart attack or other complications. When platelets are activated (turned on), they begin releasing small particles called granules and binding to one another until a clot forms.