Lee Hood: still climbing mountains

Lee Hood took to mountain climbing naturally, while he was growing up in rural Montana. The technical climbing he still practises consists generally of “going up vertical cliff faces.” His hobby could be an apt metaphor for a career in biology marked by unorthodox approaches to daunting problems. In the 1960s, Hood became the first biologist to seriously bridge the gap between biology and technology, and he has since pioneered the automation of crucial tasks such as protein and DNA sequencing. As he puts it, his career has “grown up with the biotechnology industry.” Others consider Hood not as a child of biotechnology, but as one of the industry’s prime movers. “When Lee began [automated] protein and DNA sequencing on microscale, those were not very popular things for biologists to be doing. He had the vision to realize the impact that [these techniques] would have,” says David Galas, president and chief scientific officer at Darwin Molecular, a gene-based drug discovery company for which Hood has consulted since its inception. Hood’s quests also focus on fundamental biological questions, but he has a special fondness for improving techniques, so that they can in turn be used to answer more complex questions. In the 1980s, “a lot of biologists looked down their nose at that sort of thing, saying, ‘that’s not science’,” Galas recalls. But there are few detractors now. Without Hood’s accomplishments in automated analysis — his automated fluorescence sequencer is the most successful large analytical instrument ever sold — the Human Genome Project would probably still be at the planning stage. “He has been very much a visionary,” says Galas. Hood doesn’t argue, though his easy-going nature — striking in one who has successfully battled, and risen above, the disdain of his peers — prevents him from wording it quite so bluntly. While Hood was studying for his PhD at Caltech in the mid-1960s, his mentor, Bill Dreyer, “taught me to always think ahead of the pack, and stay geared to the most important problems. If you want to change science, you invent new technology — that has the biggest impact.” He was introduced very early on to the complexities of biology. Dreyer felt that his graduate project — to determine how the immune system generates its huge number of different antibodies — would be a “Saturday afternoon thing,” Hood claims, with a touch of exaggeration. They’d badly underestimated the endeavor, as it turned out. “I started out as a protein chemist, but had to switch mid-stream to molecular biology and use those techniques to finally solve the problem.” In 1973, Hood got tenure at Caltech, where he built a lab empire infamous for its size — about 70 people at its peak. While there, he contributed intellectual capital to the formation of nine biotech companies, including Applied Biosystems. But eventually he began to meet resistance to his push to develop technology at Caltech, and in the early 1990s he began talking to Lee Huntsman, provost at the University of Washington (UW), about moving there. Huntsman had an ace up his sleeve. Mary Gates — mother of software mogul Bill — was an active member of the UW board of regents, and talked her son into attending a brunch there. Huntsman bent Bill Gates’ ear, and convinced him to attend several of Lee Hood’s visiting lectures. Gates had a longstanding interest in biotechnology, and Hood’s goal has always been to bring computer science into biotechnology, so the two were natural allies. In 1992, a $12 million grant from Gates helped found the UW Molecular Biotechnology Department, which Hood has directed since. The Department has been predictably fertile, producing, among other innovations, a new technique for synthesizing DNA chips and several software programs to handle DNA sequencing. Another program can take protein sequences generated by mass spectrometer analysis and search a database for the genes that encode them. Still looking upwards, Hood is now gathering $100 million funding for an independent biotechnology institute to be based in Seattle. He envisages computer scientists, engineers, and molecular biologists working side by side to solve complex sequencing and molecular pathway problems. Hood hopes to attract partner companies — from the pharmaceutical, instrument and software industries — to help develop and market the innovations that result. Monsanto is already on board to analyze the corn genome. The task of overseeing the new institute, due to be launched next year, seems monumental, but Hood sees it as just another mountain to climb: “I’ve always liked getting to the top of things.”