Night life in the state of Massachusetts ends at 2am in the morning. All the bars have to be empty by that time. This is quite disappointing if you are used to night life in the Netherlands, where some bars are open until 6am in the morning. As a result my friends and I try to go to parties rather then bars. I live close to the Harvard as well as the MIT campus and there are many students, PhD students and postdocs living in the area. Most of these share a house with 2 or 3 roommates. It is these type of houses where the best parties can be found.

All these parties are BYOB - Bring Your Own Beer - and typically the hosts are not very selective in who is invited but want to have a good crowd going. The trick is to know at least one invited person in each party and then you are good to go.
If only life was that simple. These house parties are often in one apartment in a building, or one floor in a house. Usually there are neighbours close by. And what do you do when you hear noise in the apartment next door? You call the police. I think out of the ten parties I have been to in the last couple of months, nine were shut down by police.
Last week it was my turn to host a party, a celebration of my new apartment and my birthday the 29th of September. I think about 40 to 50 people came, we had lots of fun, there was music in my living room and people were even dancing. But as you can guess, around 1am we were visited by two friendly police officers. I got lucky, since their only request was to shut down the music. My guests could stay as much as they wanted and the last people left about 03:30 in the morning. It took two days to get rid of both the hangover and the mess but I am glad I could do something in return to the Cambridge party community. We move on to two more parties this weekend.

September 4 2008, a day to remember if you are a scientist working in the Broad Institute and TCGA. It started this morning with a celebration of the fourth birthday of the Broad. Rumors had been floating around for a few weeks about big announcements that were going to be made. We would become a separate institute. We would get a third building. We would receive another huge gift from the financial founders of the institute, Eli and Edythe Broad.

Picture taken with my crappy phone cam. From left to right, Eli Broad, Eric Lander (director of Broad Institute), Edythe Broad, Deval Patrick (Massachusetts governor), David Baltimore (Nobel Prize 1975), Susan Hockfield (President of MIT) and Drew Faust (President of Harvard).

The celebration began around 930 this morning, with all ‘Broadies’ nervously awaiting in the lobby. A video was shown with employees and famous people (Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, John Kerry) talking about how great we are. Next were some short speeches starting with the director of the Institute Eric Lander, great guy bursting of energy. Then the speech that will make it into the media, Eli Broad announcing a gift of 400 million dollar ‘to ensure the permanent existence of the Institute’. 400 MILLION. That’s a lot of money. To all my corporate friends (especially those in Manhattan): read the press release. Once you have that amount of money and wish to give it away, call me, we’ll make a fine institute with your name on it.
Of course the roof went off when he announced his gift, and we had drinks and reception during the rest of the day (and did some work in between). Also present: Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts and Barack Obama’s big buddy (they wanted Bill Clinton, but he was busy), and the presidents of both Harvard and MIT.

I am not easily impressed, but it was awesome to be here today. It seems pretty historic. The Broad Institute is also going to continue as a separate body, meaning without formal connection to MIT and Harvard. All this underlines that my decision to stay at Broad as long as possible (and not move to Singapore, for instance) feels very right. The best remark of the day was made in the introductory video: “If it ain’t impossible, we are not really that interested.” Broadacious!

I would almost forget to mention that the TCGA Consortium paper was published in Nature today. I am looking forward to the ‘dear Nature author’ letter that comes with it!