the multibillion-dollar human genome project's effort  to detail the entire set of human genes was biology's moonshot. But it might have never made it off the launch pad without one key piece of technology-the automated DNA sequencer. Labs crammed full of these machines, each rapidly determining the sequence of bits of DNA, were the fuel that made the project feasible. Leading the team that developed the sequencer shortly before the genome project was initiated in the mid-1980s is just one of the achievements that has helped turn Montana native Leroy Hood into a biotech superstar. Now 62, the Caltech-trained biologist has laid the foundations for a string of biotech companies, helped unravel the mysteries of the immune system and mad-cow-disease-causing prions, built-with $12 million from Bill Gates-a molecular biotechnology department at the University of Washington, and left the university behind to found his own institute, Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology.

Founded in January 2000 with an anonymous $5 million donation, the Institute is a vehicle for what Hood sees as a whole new kind of biology-one that focuses, not on individual genes, proteins and other factors, but on how they come together in complicated systems to make us healthy or ill. Fulfilling this vision of "systems biology" will require that researchers mix lab work with computer modeling and eschew highly focused and hypothesis-driven experiments in favor of the factory style approach typified by the genome project itself. The payoff, Hood says, will be a fundamental transformation of medicine. And he's eager to develop the  technologies to make it happen.

Doing that, while at the same time trying to build his institute's endowment, keeps the biologist busy. TR senior editor Rebecca Zacks caught up with Hood this spring in a series of phone calls-5:30 in the morning was convenient for him-to his home, office, and an airport lounge.

TR: You're perhaps best known for leading the team that invented the DNA sequencer as a young Caltech professor in the early 1980s. But that was just one of four technologies you worked on at Caltech, right?
Hood: We had a deep interest in developing tools that would push biology ahead over the next 15 years. We had a clear vision of four instruments that would change the world: the DNA synthesizer, the DNA sequencer, the protein synthesizer, and the protein sequencer. They allowed one to decipher and synthesize biological information more effectively than was previously possible.