Hood calls his career 'a continuous transition from one disruptive technology to the next.'

EE Times: How has disruptive innovation been part of your career?
Leroy Hood: I look at my career as a continuous transition from one disruptive technology to the next. I've learned several lessons. One is that with disruptive technologies, the scientific community is enormously skeptical. Two, if you want to realize a disruptive technology, you have to create a new administrative structure to achieve it. Three, once you create a disruptive technology, it paves the way for the creation of others.

At Caltech, we invented four instruments for sequencing DNA and proteins. When I introduced them at Caltech, I told the chairman I was going to spend half my time doing technology and half doing molecular im­munology. He didn't say much then, but three years later he advised me to give up the technology involvement. Later, he said it was unseemly for a biologist to do engineering.

I was invited to the first-ever meeting on the Human Genome Project. In 1985, I would say 90 percent of the biologists were bitterly opposed to the project: The data would be trivial, it would take money away from other projects, it was very mechanical. They didn't see how transformational it was.

EET: So one important aspect of innovation is facing down the skeptics?
Hood: Innovators have to have enormous confidence. You could be wrong. But if you are right, you change the world.

EET: Are new organizations needed?
Hood: I had to start a company: Applied Biosystems, which is today the leader in molecular instrumentation. One of the big­gest opponents to the Human Genome Project early on was the National Institutes of Health. We had to create an institute at NIH to make sure the project got done.

EET: What other disruptive innovations have you been part of?
Hood: As a consequence of developing the DNA sequencer, we realized it took a chemist, an engineer, a molecular biologist and a computer scientist to put together everything we needed. Biology needed to become cross-disciplinary. With the help of Bill Gates, I moved to the University of Washington and set up the first cross-disciplinary department of molecular biotechnology. We invented the field of proteomics. We developed software critical to the genome project. I invented an inkjet technology that Agilent commercialized to look at the expression of genes.

In 2000, I started the Institute for Systems Biology. We've been learning how to practice this very disruptive form of biology. The idea is that if you want to understand, say, a radio, you can't study the individual transistors; you have to know how the circuits are connected and how they deal with information. In biology, you can't study just the individual genes or proteins; you have to study the networks of life.

A really disruptive idea that's just emerging is a consequence of applying systems biology to medicine and disease. The systems view gives rise to a transformation in medicine that will make it predictive, preventive and highly personalized over the next 20 years. This vision will transform the health care industry. It will change everything from pharma[ceuticals] to biotech, medical instrumentation, insurance and how medical schools train their students.

The question is what kinds of new organizations will be necessary. I think it will be a close collaboration between academic re­search centers such as ours and powerful new companies that will adopt these technologies, strategies and tools to practice medicine in a very different way. I started a company in blood diagnostics called Homestead that I think will provide the opening salvo in the revolution.

My guess is, in 10 years we will be able to have 300 million human genome sequences, and from each one we will be able to write out a predictive health history for the individual. We will also have handheld or home devices that can prick the individual's finger, take a drop of blood and measure the concentrations of 2,000 proteins that will constitute a window into health and disease. In the next 15 to 20 years, we will be able to apply these systems to understand the networks of life for normal and diseased cells.

Each of us differs by 6 million letters of the DNA language. Therefore, we have to be treated in a highly personalized way. That will transform medicine.