TheThreePercent

Scientific American’s podcast this week interviews Dr. Leroy Hood, one of the creators of the DNA gene sequencer, for which everyone who watches CSI should be thankful.  Dr. Hood is currently the Chairman and founder of the University of Washington’s cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biology and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

His notion is that we have to look at living organisms as a whole, not just look at the bits, like the DNA or a protein, or even ‘big’ structures like blood cells.  Scientists need to understand the body as an information system, a network.  Now that would be cool enough, because like all threepercenters, it means Dr. Hood is an advocate of crossing boundaries – in this case life science and areas like computer science.  A cross-disciplinary biology department?  Yeah, Dr. Hood is cool.

But that’s not why he shows up here.  What struck me about the podcast was that Dr. Hood spent a good bit of time crossing a different boundary – science and business.  As a systems thinker, Dr. Hood refreshingly does not distinguish between business and science.  Clearly to him, there really isn’t much of a difference – they are both complex systems, networks. 

He was credited as much for creating the Systems Biology Institute as for creating a number of new business concepts based on gene sequencing and other technologies.  So what does Dr. Hood ask at the end of the interview?  Not how we are going to find new technology for understanding the body – this will happen of course – but rather how we will use these tools to change how the web of operators, including hospitals, doctors, pharmaceuticals, medical device makers, insurers…patients, organize themselves and interact.  If we can tailor-make drugs that only work effectively for a single person, who in the pharma business loses their job?  And who gets a whole new job?  One thing seems likely – the distinction between companies like Pfizer and companies like IBM is going to get a lot fuzzier.

Business and science – not really all that different from a systems point of view.  We’re all just playing with patterns.