Notes From Lee Hood

Notes From Lee Hood Co-Founder of The Institute for Systems Biology

Lee Hood gave a lecture recently on the future of medical science. He is a serious visionary and has had significant success in science and entrepreneurship to support his reputation. He started at Cal Tech developing synthesizers and sequencers and, when Cal Tech felt that commercialization was beneath the dignity of educational institutions, took the ideas public and created Applied Biosystems, a company that continued his protein analytics and eventually was acquired for 6.7 billion dollars. He moved to The University of Washington and, with Gates' help, created a cross-disciplinary biology department whose research contributed to the Human Genome Project and the cell sorter. He currently heads the Institute of Science Biology.

Here are some notes from his talk:
There are new major factors in the biology of the new medicine. Complexity is the greatest. There is so much information across so many disciplines that interaction between biologists with mathematicians, engineers, physicists and statisticians will be mandatory. And, according to Thomas Kuhn ("Structure of the Scientific Revolution"), progress will be slow. And development will be Darwinian. Evolution is not only slow, it builds on any success. There is no Occam's razor in the evolution of life or knowledge. Rather it is like a Rube Goldberg machine; if it works, it stays. Moreover the analysis of a Rube Goldberg machine is difficult because it is not necessarily logical, it is only functional. Third, the future will involve paradigm shifts. The rise of systems biology, the genome, protein synthesis all require new organizational plans and, the fourth, cross disciplinary science where the biologist and the engineer are partners.

More notes tomorrow.

N.B. The Internet article where the illegal alien stats were taken on the 10/18/11 blog has disappeared.