last updated August 2010
The impact of systems biology on medicine
Dr Leroy Hood - developer of the first gene-sequencing machine.
At the 7th International Bio Forum & Bio Expo Japan (Bio Expo), held in Tokyo in July 2008, Dr. Leroy (Lee) Hood1, the president of the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, USA, shared his views with A-IMBN counselor Chris Y. H. Tan2 on how systems biology is transforming our understanding of biology and disease, and how it will revolutionize our approach to medicine.
TAN: As the founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, USA, how would you explain systems biology in an elevator speech?
HOOD: I would say that systems biology is very much like what an engineer would do in trying to figure out how radio waves work; how you convert radio waves into sound waves. The first thing you do is to take a radio apart, look at the individual components, and try and understand what each one does. And that is exactly what molecular and cell biologists have done for the last 40 years. What was transformational about the Human Genome Project, for example, is that it gave us — for the first time — the complete ‘parts list’ of all the genes. And, by inference, all the proteins that are essential in systems biology.
The second thing [a systems biologist does] is put those components together in a circuit to understand how they individually and collectively carry out this conversion process — again, as with converting radio waves to sound waves. Systems biology is all about understanding how living organisms handle information by virtue of biological circuits that operate in exactly the same kind of way. Organisms take in information, or acquire it from the genome, transmit it and modulate it, and then integrate it and put it out into little molecular machines that actually execute the function.
Systems biology essentially applies to human health – understanding how systems work, and how those systems are perturbed such that their altered activities lead to the disease process.
TAN: How do you overcome the resistance of star academics, who have been working on their favorite signaling pathways all their lives, to systems biology since this area needs good biologists?
HOOD: You get them to play by attracting them with success. I will give you an analogy. When we started talking about the Human Genome Project in 1985, I would guess that 90% of the biologists were totally resistant on doctrinaire grounds. The perception was that big science is bad, and you’re never ever going to find anything very interesting. Those people were very hard to convince until they looked at it carefully in detail. Actually, that was what the National Academy Committee in the US did in 1988, and they argued that the genome project should go ahead.
The biggest opponent to the genome project at that time was the US National Institute of Health (NIH). They were bitterly opposed to it. Eventually, they created a new institute, the NIH National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR) that later became the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which was responsible for the Human Genome Project.
I would say the same has been true for systems biology. When we first set up the Institute for Systems Biology in 2000, there was enormous skepticism. I remember going to see Bill Gates and telling him I was leaving the university. He tried to dissuade me from doing that, but I said I felt I had to. So he asked me: “How are you going to fund it?” I replied that that is part of the reason why I came was to see you. He just said: “I never fund anything that I don't think is going to succeed.” So I spent the next four years making sure that it was going to succeed — which it did. We have a good relationship now and he is supporting the institute.
I think you persuade skeptics by proving it is going to work. Older people are harder to persuade than younger ones, because the younger scientists, I think, can see the future more fully in many cases.
