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It’s a story as old as humankind. Boy (or girl) meets bug, a struggle for dominance ensues, and someone gets hurt.

Rakesh Karmacharya spends one day each week treating severely ill psychotic patients as the medical director of the Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research Clinic at McLean Hospital, a Harvard psychiatric hospital in Belmont, MA. The rest of his professional week is spent at the ӳ����ý where he works as a physician-scientist in the Chemical Biology Program. For several years, Rakesh has been bringing these two worlds together in the form of a project to identify how clozapine, the main drug used for treatment of schizophrenia, exerts its therapeutic effects.

After a storied career running a multimillion-dollar business, Ted Stanley and his wife, Vada, set up a philanthropic foundation in the 1980s to invest in good causes. Their goals became a lot more focused when their son developed bipolar disorder and needed treatment. The Stanleys considered themselves fortunate that the drug lithium successfully treated his symptoms – and they want to make sure that someday, there is a much wider range of options for others with psychiatric illness.

One summer day, two ӳ����ý researchers who had never met before sat next to each other at a lunch table. Moran Yassour, a graduate student in computational biology, and Manfred Grabherr, an engineer turned computational biologist, struck up a conversation about their research interests.

“I realized, this is the Manfred people have been telling me about,” Moran recalls. “People had told us about each other but we’d never spoken before.”