On a visit to Bangalore in 1998, Robert A. Weinberg ’64, one of America’s leading cancer researchers, met a voraciously curious young doctoral student from a South Indian village so remote that he grew up without phones or television, studying by kerosene lamp. He had no Western-style last name, only a first — Mani.

East is East and West is West, and the difference between them is starting to turn up even on brain scanners.

The Broad Institute, the genomics powerhouse in Cambridge, Mass., announced Wednesday that it will receive what it believes is the biggest gift ever for psychiatric research to a single US institution: $100 million to decipher the genetics of severe mental illnesses.