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This is a lecture
on Systems Medicine
and Proactive P4 medicine,
Revolutionizing Health Care.
Is by Lee Hood, President
of the Institute
for Systems Biology in
Seattle, Washington.
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The grand challenge for
biology and medicine
has always been deciphering the
incredible biological complexity
that are intrinsic to both.
I remember early in the
1970s when I went to Caltech,
puzzling over biological
complexity, and beginning
to think in the earliest embryonic
ways about systems approaches
to deal with that complexity, it was
clear that we were really lacking
in both technological and
conceptual approaches to complexity.
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It is amusing now to look over
my career of some 40 years,
and to see that I had actually
participated in five paradigm
changes in biology that
dealt with complexity.
The first of these
paradigm changes was
bringing engineering to biology.
I developed five
instruments that allowed
us to analyze and synthesize
proteins and genes.
One of these was the
automated DNA sequencer.
And these instruments led
to high throughput biology,
and this, of course, ended up
in creating the age of big data
in biology that we're
all so familiar with.
The second paradigm change
had to do with the fact
that while inventing the
automated DNA sequencer,
people were beginning to consider
the Human Genome Project.
And I was invited to
the first meeting ever,
and it took us five
years to persuade
a very skeptical
biological audience.
But indeed, the Human Genome Project
gave systems approaches to biology
an enormous boost forward
by creating a complete parts
list for human genes, and by
inference for the human proteins.
The other advance that the
automated DNA sequencer brought
is I realized how to be successful
we had to integrate the disciplines
of engineering, computer
science, chemistry, and biology.
And I began then arguing that
biology should create departments
that are cross-disciplinary
in nature,
and that integrate into
the biology department,
the technology experts
needed to invent
the technologies of
the future for biology.
This enabled me to create
the Department of Molecular
Biotechnology at the
University of Washington,
with the generous
help with Bill Gates.
And that department
went on over eight years
to just revolutionize
various aspects
of genomics, and proteomics,
and cell biology.
It was clear that I needed to
develop systems biology, again,
to really deal with the complexity.
And I ended up resigning from
the University of Washington
and creating my own
institute, the Institute
for Systems Biology
in the year 2000.
And it has focused, indeed,
on developing systems science,
and the allied technologies
and analytic tools
that were necessary for it.
And very early on
in this endeavor, we
started applying systems
biology to disease.
And from that emerged the
discipline of systems medicine,
and ultimately,
proactive P4 medicine,
and I'll talk in some detail
about what each of those
are subsequently.
