Astrophysicist Lake will explore inner space of DNA

The Human Genome Project has been called biology's equivalent of the 1960s race to put a man on the Moon, so nobody should be very surprised that Dr. Leroy Hood has recruited a rocket scientist to help him decipher the genetic code.

Dr. George Lake, a University of Washington astrophysicist and a NASA project leader in supercomputing, has decided to leave his UW position and, along with three other UW faculty, join Hood in his new private research venture in Seattle.

"It's a career change to be sure," Lake said. The challenge for biology today, he said, is one of data management and analysis. So Lake plans to shift his digital talents from the stars to the inner space of human genes and cells.

"It should be very challenging," he said.

Hood, a pioneer of the automated DNA sequencing machines that made the massive genome project possible, left the UW in December in frustration with university constraints on his work.

He created a non-profit research organization, the Institute for Systems Biology, to capitalize on the wealth of information created by the recently completed sequencing of the human genome.

The identification of the exact sequence of all the DNA in the entire human genetic code, the genome, has been heralded as one of science's greatest accomplishments.

"We want to move from information to knowledge," Hood said. The completed genome represents a largely untapped information resource about the human body, he said, that will require an even more massive and creative effort to fully translate the genetic sequence for practical uses.

After Hood resigned, the UW created the Cell Systems Initiative to replace the Institute for Quantitative Systems Biology, which Hood, Dr. Ruedi Aebersold and Dr. Alan Aderem helped found. Dr. Robert Franza, also a founder and Hood's former UW colleague, operates the UW's new Cell Systems Initiative.

Hood has been seeking funding for his institute from private donors, industry and government sources. The UW's CSI, created to be similarly self-sustaining financially, was started with backing from Immunex.

Hood yesterday said he didn't see his institute as competitive with the UW or as contributing to a "brain drain" on the university.

"I think the institute is going to be a tremendous resource for the university," he said, noting he recently met with UW President Dr. Richard McCormick to promote such collaboration.

L.G. Blanchard, spokesman for the UW School of Medicine, said the departure of a few researchers will have little effect on the university's long-term goal of being a leader in molecular biology and genomics.

"The UW School of Medicine is as strongly committed as ever to having an excellent molecular biology research program," Blanchard said.

In addition to Lake, Aebersold, Aderem and Dr. Ger van den Engh yesterday also announced their intentions to leave the UW and join Hood.

Aebersold is a world-renowned expert in protein chemistry and proteomics -- the study of three-dimensional protein-to-protein interactions in the body. Genes produce proteins and proteins do the work in the cells.

Aderem is an expert in immunology, a primary area of interest for Hood's institute. Van den Engh, a biophysicist, has developed some key instruments used to differentiate cell types with speed and precision.

Hood's vision for his new institute is to create a research environment that is more entrepreneurial than the university setting but less commercially oriented than an industrial laboratory.

The "systems" approach is needed, he explained, to move biology from its current state of affairs -- a vast collection of disparate parts -- to an understanding of how genes, proteins and cells work in a living body in real time.

Hood's institute and the UW's CSI, like many other research groups, intend to marry computing with biology to achieve this systems understanding of the body.

But Hood contended his approach is unique, as evidenced in part by his recruitment of Lake, an astrophysicist.

"Nobody else has put together anything like this," he said.

P-I reporter Tom Paulson

can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattle-pi.com