Steven E. Hyman, a renowned leader in neuroscience, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, former Harvard University provost and current Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University, will become the director of the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, effective February 15.

Hyman succeeds Edward Scolnick, the founding director of the Stanley Center, who launched the Stanley Center in 2007 after a distinguished career spanning psychiatric disease research, drug discovery and development, cancer research, and molecular biology. Scolnick will remain a core faculty member of the Broad and will become Chief Scientist at the Stanley Center.

“Steve Hyman is an extraordinary leader who brings remarkable expertise in neuroscience and scientific leadership as well as a deep understanding of the Broad Institute to his new role as director of the Stanley Center,” said Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute. “Under Ed Scolnick’s leadership, the pioneering efforts of the Stanley Center have been truly remarkable. With Steve’s guidance, the Center will build on this extraordinary foundation to understand the mechanisms of psychiatric disease.”
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At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation. Although Reding depicted the new right as a modest expansion of existing data privacy rights, in fact it represents the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade. The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.

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