Whitehead Institute

Hahn's ties to Dana-Farber date back to 1985 when he started as an undergraduate in a research lab.

He later trained under the legendary Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he learned to think deeply about problems.

Dr. Hahn is a leader in oncogenomics.

He was part of a team that proved a normal human cell could be transformed into a cancer cell by manipulating a small set of genes.

The lab has really evolved, um, since its, its, its start.

So this is the Cheeseman lab at the Whitehead Institute.

And so when I was there, I was kind of the last person doing true like mitosis type stuff.

Mm-hmm.

And evolutionary biologist Jenny Graves has calculated that if that deterioration continues at the same rate, the Y could disappear entirely in a relatively quick five to 6 million years, which might seem like a while, but time flies, people.

Another evolutionary biologist, Jen Hughes of MIT's Whitehead Institute, argues that the Y lost genes rapidly early in its evolution, but then essentially stabilized with very few of its remaining core genes disappearing over the past 25 million years.

Those genes still perform important functions throughout the body.

Among them, for instance, managing proteins.

But before that, I was at a company called Humanity Therapeutics, and this was a small molecule company focused on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and ALS.

And this was actually work that was stemming from work that myself and others had done at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, during my postdoc.

So Susan Lindquist was our founding scientist, and I was the second employee, and we really sort of built this company.

and brought some small molecules forward for neurodegenerative disease.