About Leroy Hood: Leroy Hood is an American biologist. He is president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology.
Many nonprofits rely on grants alone.
For some people, it's best for their mental health to know they have the gene for Huntington's and some time in the future they'll have a problem. But to other people, it would be a disaster.
What is unique about humans is their individuality.
Almost never does a single company have excellence in a multiplicity of disciplines.
Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them.
If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.
If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.
I think the real problem is it's easy to persuade young kids of particular kinds of ideas, because they are flexible.
Don't listen to the prevailing majority points of view. If you have new ideas, push them.
If you look at healthcare today, it's all about disease. It's not about understanding wellness at all.
To manipulate the immune system, you need to find the key bottlenecks that govern the system. The T-cell is an absolute bottleneck.
The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.
Anybody that thought the genome was going to directly provide drugs was a fool. Biological networks are not simple, and making drugs to affect them won't be simple.
The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine.
Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.
I didn't want my genome to be sequenced by any of the companies that were out there doing the partial sequences just from the point of view of commercialisation.
If you go to the FDA with a drug that's only meant to treat 50 people, and it's a 95 percent cure rate, you'll get your drug approved.
Most of the people who claim to be doing systems biology are really studying simple and complex molecular machines and how they function, and that is an aspect of systems biology; but it isn't. It's the networks that really capture and store and tran...
In the late 1970s, when I was a professor at Caltech, I pioneered four instruments for analyzing genes and proteins that revolutionized modern biology - and one of these, the automated DNA sequencer, enabled the Human Genome Project.
In the end, what counts is what you do.
