[6][1][7][8] In response to allegations that he had engaged in bullying and abusive conduct, Lander apologized and resigned from the Biden Administration effective February 18, 2022.

[13] He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School,[14] graduating in 1974 as valedictorian and an International Mathematical Olympiad Silver Medalist for the U.S.[15] At age 17, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers, for which he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

[18] He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the University of Oxford in 1980 with a thesis on algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs supervised by Peter Cameron.

At the suggestion of his brother, developmental biologist Arthur Lander, he started to look at neurobiology, saying at the time, "because there's a lot of information in the brain".

Botstein was working on a way to unravel how subtle differences in complex genetic systems can become disorders such as cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and even obesity.

It also made important breakthroughs in applying this information to the study of human genetic variation and formed the basis for the foundation of the Broad Institute—a transformation Lander spearheaded.

The first was the Human Genome Project, a loosely organized, publicly funded effort that intended to publish the information it obtained freely and without restrictions.

Established first, the Human Genome Project moved slowly in the early phases as the Department of Energy's role was unclear and sequencing technology was in its infancy.

The WICGR has since sequenced the genomes of Ciona savignyi (sea squirt),[31] the pufferfish,[32] the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa,[33] and multiple relatives of Saccharomyces cerevisiae,[34] one of the most studied yeasts.

The sequencing of the yeasts related to Saccharomyces cerevisiae will facilitate the identification of key gene regulatory elements, some of which may be common to all eukaryotes (including both plant and animal kingdoms).

[42] Lander received criticism in the past for allegedly diminishing the accomplishments of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier after publishing "The Heroes of CRISPR" in Cell.

[40] Of particular note, Lander was accused of a conflict of interest, as the Broad Institute had been competing with UC Berkeley for patent rights to commercialize CRISPR.

[45] During questioning for his role of Science Advisor to the President, Lander admitted that he had made a mistake in understating the accomplishments of Doudna and Charpentier.

He showed that the then-current method of interpreting DNA evidence was liable to give false positive matches, implicating innocent defendants.

[46][47][48] Two of the defense attorneys in that case, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, went on to found the Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA analysis to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners.

[50] In January 2021, President-elect Joe Biden nominated Lander as Science Advisor to the President and announced that he would elevate the position to a Cabinet-level post.

[41][51] His nomination had been held up possibly due to requests for clarification about his having attended two gatherings where Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy large-scale donor to science who was also a convicted sex offender, was present.

[64] In 2023, Lander started a non-profit called Science for America focused on "moonshot" ideas such as nuclear fusion or cancer research.

[67] In December 2008, Lander and Harold E. Varmus were named co-chairs of the Obama administration's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.