A Brief History

The Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases (GCD) was started in 2003 by Dean Barry Bloom, Department of Nutrition Chair Walter Willet, and Professor Gokhan Hotamisligil as a new life sciences department dedicated to expanding the research scope and expertise of Harvard Chan School. One core goal: Defining the causal mechanisms of global health threats, including the most common non-communicable diseases.

During the first decade of GCD, it became evident that nutrient sensing and metabolism were the mechanistic threads that bound such diseases together—and increasingly, they became the threads that bound the individual GCD labs together. This recognition coincided with national and international transformations in both basic- and disease-focused biological research to emphasize metabolic function and dysfunction as being key to human health and disease, leading to the emergence of entire new fields, including cancer metabolism, immunometabolism, and integrated physiology.

Thanks to the foresight of Drs. Bloom, Willet, and Hotamisligil, GCD was well ahead of peer departments in this revolution and remains a leader in cutting-edge, metabolism-based research worldwide. In 2019, with a vote of the faculty, the name of GCD was changed to Molecular Metabolism (MET) to better reflect the department’s shared focus and the mission that makes it unique at Harvard.