Short answers, pulled from the story.
Boston University was founded in 1839 by a group of Methodist ministers and laymen, originally as the Newbury Biblical Institute in Newbury, Vermont. The Massachusetts Legislature formally chartered it as Boston University in 1869, with Isaac Rich, Lee Claflin, and Jacob Sleeper as its three principal founders.
Alexander Graham Bell was a professor at Boston University and invented the telephone in a BU laboratory in 1875. The university had given him a year's salary advance to support his research before the invention.
Helen Magill White earned a doctorate from Boston University in 1877, making her the first woman in the United States to receive a PhD. Her thesis was titled "The Greek Drama."
The 1869 charter prohibited Boston University from requiring religious tests of its instructors or refusing students based on religious beliefs. It also opened every department equally to students regardless of sex and race, at a time when such provisions were rare in American higher education.
Boston University has had four Nobel Prize winners on its faculty. Elie Wiesel and Derek Walcott won their prizes after being recruited by president John Silber. Saul Bellow and Sheldon Glashow had already won the Nobel Prize before Silber brought them to BU.
In October 2022, researchers at BU's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories modified the COVID-19 virus using Omicron spike proteins, creating a hybrid more lethal to lab mice than Omicron but less lethal than the original strain. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University called the work unquestionably gain-of-function research. The researchers had failed to notify the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded the lab, before proceeding.