Two weeks before Christmas 1999, Lee Hood appeared to have it all. A loving family. Money. Fame. Power. He counted Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men, as a friend and supporter. Eight years earlier, Gates gave the University of Washington $12 million to lure the star biologist from Caltech in what the Wall Street Journal called a “major coup.” Hood’s assignment: build a first-of-its-kind research department at the intersection of biology, computer science, and medicine.
Even at sixty-one, the former quarterback of an undefeated high school football team could still do one hundred push-ups in a row. He ran at least three miles a day. He climbed mountains. He traveled the world to give scientific talks to rapt audiences. He slept just four to five hours a night. Apart from indulging in a luxurious art-filled mansion along Lake Washington, he cared little for the finer things in life, sporting a cheap plastic wristwatch and driving an old Toyota Camry. He still had the same wonder and enthusiasm for science he had as a boy.
Yet here, at the turn of the millennium, Hood was miserable. Just as his once-controversial vision for “big science” was becoming a reality through the Human Genome Project, he didn’t feel like a winner. He felt suffocated. He had a new vision, a more far-sighted and expansive one that he insisted would revolutionize health care. He felt the university bureaucrats who were in charge couldn’t see the vision and kept getting in his way. It was time for Hood to have a difficult conversation with his biggest supporter.
On a typically dark and gray December day in Seattle, Hood climbed into his dinged-up Camry and drove across the Highway 520 floating bridge over Lake Washington to meet Gates, the billionaire CEO of Microsoft. Hood came to say he had resigned his Gates-funded professorship at UW. He felt he had no choice but to start a new institute, free from university red tape. It was the only way to fulfill his dream for biology in the twenty-first century.
Gates was well aware of Hood’s record of achievements and its catalytic potential for medicine. Hood led the team at Caltech that invented four research instrument prototypes in the 1980s, including the first automated DNA sequencer. The improved machines that followed made the Human Genome Project possible and transformed biology into more of a data-driven, quantitative science. Researchers no longer had to spend several years—an entire graduate student’s career—just to determine the sequence of a single gene. With fast, automated sequencing tools, a new generation of biologists could think broadly about the billions of units of DNA. The sequences were obviously important, as they held the instructions to make proteins that do the work within cells. Thousands of labs around the world—at research institutions, diagnostic companies, and drugmakers—used the progeny of Hood’s prototype instruments as everyday workhorses. George Rathmann, the founding CEO at Amgen, biotech’s first big success story, once said Hood “accelerated the whole field of biotechnology by a number of years.”
Hood had an unusually clear and far-reaching view for how biologists could fully exploit the new instruments. His enthusiasm inspired many bright scientists to devote themselves to his vision and to do their best work.
Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, Hood believed biology was ready for more ambitious goals. He believed traditional reductionism, looking at one gene at a time, was outdated “small science.” The time was right, he argued, for scientists to look at hundreds or thousands of genes and proteins together in the complex symphony that makes up a whole human organism with trillions of cells. Biology, like physics, had an opportunity to become “big science”—fueled by big money, big teams, and big goals.
The way to tackle such complexity, Hood said, was through what he called “systems biology.” It was a new twist on an old idea that involved bringing scientists together from biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science. He would break every rule and custom of academia, if necessary, to make it happen. That was his way. But it wasn’t going to happen at the University of Washington. Abruptly, he quit.
On that gloomy day in December 1999, Hood wanted to break the news to Gates in person. Gates was curious to hear what was so important that it couldn’t wait.
The men sat down in a couple of comfortable chairs in Gates’s office in Building 8 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Hood got right to the point. He’d resigned his endowed Gates professorship at UW because the bureaucracy of a public institution would never be flexible enough to let him achieve his goals for multidisciplinary systems biology. Hardly stopping for breath, Hood barreled through his long list of grievances with administrators who didn’t share his vision. He rhapsodized about the opportunity for systems biology.
The billionaire listened for a solid fifteen to twenty minutes. When Gates asked whether the dispute could be resolved some other way, Hood said he had tried for three years to set up such an institute within the university. Starting his own institute was the only way.
When Hood had said his piece, Gates cut to the heart of the matter.
“How are you going to fund this institute?” he asked.
“Well, that’s part of the reason I’m here . . .” Hood replied.
Gates interjected. “I never fund anything I think is going to fail.”
Hood was stunned. He hadn’t expected Gates to commit on the spot to bankrolling a new institute. But he didn’t expect to be flatly dismissed. Gates was a logical thinker, not the impulsive type. He was a kindred spirit, an entrepreneur, a fellow impatient optimist. Years earlier, they bonded on a safari in East Africa; Hood listened to Gates talk about the “digital divide” as hippopotamuses grunted in the night. Often, Gates peppered his biologist friend with questions about the human immune system, widely considered to be the most sophisticated adaptive intelligence system in the universe. The recruitment of Hood helped raise the University of Washington to international prominence in genomics and biotechnology during the 1990s. Given that success, Hood thought he could talk his friend into providing as much as $200 million for a new institute.
Gates didn’t give his institute a penny in its first five years.
On the drive home that day in December 1999, Hood wondered whether he had said something wrong, failed to make a case. But it was a fleeting emotion. Moments of self-doubt, to the extent he had them, were brief. He confided in his wife, Valerie Logan, the one person he knew would support him, no matter what. He brooded for a while. “It shocked and hurt me,” Hood said. “It was a statement of skepticism from someone I had hoped would support me.”
Others who were close to the situation understood why the meeting had gone badly. “Bill had not, at that time, been schooled in philanthropy,” said Roger Perlmutter, a former student of Hood’s who went on to run R&D at Amgen and Merck. “This gift to the University of Washington to create Molecular Biotechnology was surely the biggest thing he had done in philanthropy. It was all done to bring Lee here. And then in short order, it unravels? It was a kick in the teeth.”
If Hood’s first thought was that he had possibly damaged his relationship with his most important benefactor, his second thought was that his vision was right. He would find other support. He had some money already. He had shares in Amgen, the biotech company he advised from its early days, which went on to become one of the best performing stocks of the 1990s. He also made millions from royalties on DNA sequencers sold by another company he helped start—Applied Biosystems. Hood had other wealthy friends and companies he could call.
There was a lot to think about beyond science. Where to begin on starting a new institute? Even though he was hailed as one of biotech’s great first-generation entrepreneurs, Hood had never played an executive role in running those enterprises. Now, he would have to act as a start-up CEO responsible for not just vision and fund-raising, but day-to-day operations. He knew he wasn’t a skilled administrator. He was impatient in meetings, lacked empathy, and made clear to all around him that he didn’t want to hear any bad news. He had a habit of avoiding sensitive personnel matters, like whether to fire people. And those qualities had resulted in some spectacular failures.
None of that deterred him. Hood had always overachieved, going back to his childhood in Montana. He craved the adulation of others. He always found it on the football field, in the classroom, the lab, the lecture hall, and the boardroom. When people told him he couldn’t do things, he would grit his teeth and prove them wrong.
Hood’s son, Eran, once said of his father: “I always joke they should take the Tupac Shakur song, ‘Me Against the World’ and rewrite it as ‘Lee Against the World.’ They could take out the district attorneys and the crooked cops and put in university presidents and the medical school deans who just don’t know, don’t understand, his vision.”
The path ahead was clear. Hood had to prove his vision was right. He would push himself around the clock, to the far ends of the earth, spend his last nickel. Just as he sought to prove himself as a boy, Hood would prove himself again. Nothing would get in his way.