In 1988, a college dropout named Jonathan Stanley was convinced that government agents were chasing after him. For three days and nights he raced through streets and subway tunnels. After the police took him to a hospital, he finally received effective treatment two years after getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. "My son's life was saved," his father, Ted Stanley, said. He then created a foundation to support psychiatric research. In July 2014, the Stanley Family Foundation donated $650 million to Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a research center to which he had earlier donated $100 million. It comes at a time when research into mental illness is sputtering. The Broad Institute timed its announcement of the donation to coincide with the release of the largest analysis ever on the genetics of schizophrenia. The analysis identified more than 100 regions of DNA associated with the disease. Many contain genes involved in just a few biological functions, like pumping calcium into neurons that could help guide the search for treatments. "For the first time, there's a clear path forward," said Eric Lander of the Broad Institute. When scientists discovered psychiatric drugs like lithium in the mid-20th century, they did so mostly by accident. For years, they hoped figuring out the action of the drugs would help them understand the causes of the diseases. But they came up empty. Some researchers argued that a better strategy would be to find the genes involved in psychiatric disorders. This approach would give them new molecular targets for drugs they could test. Recent research has found that mutations in the very same gene can cause a wide range of brain disorders, including autism, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. "We have no idea at all about why that is, and the only way to find out is to do some hard biology – to find out not only which genes matter, but what about them matters," Dr. Goldstein said. The new study found that many risk variants clustered around specific body functions, like the immune system and calcium transmission in brain cells. To understand their underlying biology, Broad researchers plan to grow neurons with mutations in the genes they have found, to see how they differ from normal cells. They will engineer mutated mice to see how their brains are affected. These studies will be expensive, which is where the Stanley Family Foundation comes in.