Leroy Hood, Founder, Institute for Systems Biology

Leroy Hood helped revolutionize genomics when he co-invented the automated DNA sequencer. In 1992, he came to Seattle to establish the University of Washington’s Department of Molecular Biotechnology. Now, as founder of the Institute for Systems Biology, he is on a mission to revolutionize health care with an approach he calls P4 Medicine: predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory.

Leslie Helm | January 2012 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Hayley Young

EARLY YEARS: My father was an electrical engineer at the Mountain States Telephone Company. He taught courses on circuit design and electronics. When I was in high school, he made me take those courses, mostly, I think, to show off to his friends how smart his son was. I really disliked it but I learned a lot and it has really framed my thinking. I have an engineering orientation toward biology and medicine. My granddad ran a summer geology camp where students and professors from Harvard, Yale and Columbia came every summer. One of the courses I took became my project for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. I was one of the first winners from Montana.

EDUCATION: I had three of the best teachers in high school that I had in my entire career. My chemistry teacher had gone to Caltech during World War II as a navigator and insisted I look into it. I had reservations about going to a technical school instead of a liberal arts school, but it was really a terrific decision. It gave me the background to do what I have done.

MANAGEMENT LESSONS: The organizations that make a difference in science are small, agile and able to make decisions and move effectively. The bureaucracy at academic institutions, particularly state institutions, can be stultifying for people who want to effect paradigm changes. That was true of systems biology at the UW. There were so many things I needed to do that I couldn’t do.

ADVICE TO THE UW: Of the 270 faculty members at Caltech, there were five who were superb for changing their world and providing a model for others. They brought the university unbelievable amounts of money. If you want to change [the UW’s] culture, I’d go out and try to hire a few people like that. They are hard to get, but even one of them will make an enormous difference both in the science and entrepreneurship.

SYSTEMS BIOLOGY: In a human, it’s just like figuring out how a radio works. First, you get a list of parts and see how they work individually. Then you put them in their circuits and see how they work, how they convert radio waves into sound waves. With human beings, we have biological circuits, so we have to understand the individual components [organs], and then we have to understand how the circuits are connected up, how they change over