All parts of the system must be constructed with reference to all other parts, since, in one sense, all the parts form one machine.
—THOMAS EDISON
INVENTIONS RARELY EXIST IN ISOLATION. No matter how clever the idea or great the implementation, an invention typically lives or dies depending on how well it can be integrated into a larger social and technological context. That context is made up of systems. Systems have many parts and join together many related inventions. We have multiple systems for transportation, systems for computing and telecommunications, systems for healthcare. We have systems for developing, processing, and delivering everything from food to pharmaceuticals to music. That’s why the greatest inventions of all are systems inventions and why every new system needs to work with or replace existing systems.
Thomas Edison thought in terms of systems. That’s why he’s remembered more readily than Joseph Swan, who demonstrated his incandescent lamp in Newcastle, England, many months before Edison did. Of the two, why did Edison achieve far more wealth and fame? Was it because Edison was a better promoter or fund-raiser, or hired better patent attorneys? Perhaps. But there’s no question that Edison’s greatest achievement was in seeing that the lightbulb was not an end result but the beginning, and that it would require the creation of a vast power generation and delivery system that would span entire cities. The lightbulb was a vast improvement over gas lamps. But by itself it couldn’t have won out. The gas lighting industry fought Edison in court and on every other front. It wasn’t an easy battle. A lightbulb alone doesn’t convince a city to rip up its entire network of street lamps and replace it with something else. In fact, Swan lost that battle in his country, and England stuck with gas lighting for nearly three decades afterward.
Edison knew he had to develop a complete system. He needed a way to get the light to the people. He needed to integrate electric turbines, power relays, endless miles of wiring, and an entire logistical infrastructure. He knew that if he could link an electric power plant to the home of J. P. Morgan and give the banker illumination on demand, he’d have a much better chance of raising money than if he just went around with a neat lightbulb demo. Swan, meanwhile, tried to retrofit his lightbulb into existing systems. It didn’t quite work, investors turned away, and the politicians aimed to protect the status quo. Asked late in life what his greatest invention was, Edison didn’t name the electric light alone but “the incandescent electric lighting and power system.” That’s why those who wish to replace Edison’s system with an LED lighting and power system must draw upon this same sort of thinking.
The same principle applied to the automobile. Many inventors created cars before Henry Ford came along. In 1885 Karl Benz invented the first motorcar, and his future business partner, Gottfried Daimler, built the first motorcycle the same year. French inventors took the lead shortly thereafter. In 1893, the Duryea brothers held the first U.S. demonstration of a gasoline-powered car. Two years later, a Duryea car won the famous Chicago motor race, with an average speed of 6.66 miles per hour. At the time, Ford was working as a power station supervisor at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit. Ford idolized Edison, and later in life they became close friends.
Inspired by magazine articles that showed how to build your own gasoline engine, the twenty-three-year-old Ford set aside an area of the plant as his workshop. In 1896, he transferred his tinkering to a shed behind his house, where he created a five-hundred-pound contraption he called the quadricycle. But Ford wasn’t yet thinking like a systems inventor. The car was bigger than the shed’s door frame, and he had to hack down the frame with an axe to get the vehicle outside. Once he did, though, the machine clocked in at twenty miles per hour.
What happened next distinguished Ford from the pack. He became the first successful carmaker not because he built the fastest car but because he invented a system that embraced all the complexity of making cars. Between 1900 and 1906, more than five hundred car companies cropped up in the United States alone. Ford’s cars were only one of many makes. But as he began designing the first Model T, Ford started focusing on a way to produce more cars more quickly and at a lower price than anyone else. “The proper system, as I have it in mind, is to get the car to the multitude,” he declared.1
He came up with four principles: division of labor, interchangeable parts, continuous flow, and reduction of wasted effort. These principles pointed Ford to his greatest invention: the moving assembly line. First installed at his Highland Park plant in 1913, Ford’s assembly line grew into the defining business system of the century. Ford was able to produce more cars in a day than other companies could make in a month. By 1927, the Ford Motor Company had mass-produced fifteen million Model Ts. The rest of the industry adopted his system and consolidated into a handful of companies.
Large-scale systems such as these transformed invention itself. The most powerful systems naturally led to monopolies or oligopolies, and other systems sprang up to support these concentrated power structures. Independent inventors trying to apply new products to alter these systems found it increasingly difficult to break in. They soon learned that they had a better chance if they invented a completely new system and formed a new industry. With the introduction of large-scale systems, the companies that originally created them tended to grow conservative, seeking only those improvements that supported their systems. Radical ideas tended to be suppressed.
Suppression is still common, but recently big corporations have become more willing to look outside their own R&D labs for inventions to improve or extend their systems. Whereas the corporation of yesteryear typically trampled independent inventors or tied them up in patent court, corporations today are much more inclined to view crops of smaller companies as their own R&D labs.
That’s why it is key for inventors to think systematically. Whether your idea is radical or conservative, big or small, if you fail to think systematically you won’t get very far in a world of interdependencies. “Our world is systems within systems,” says business systems inventor Jay Walker. “When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I invent commercial systems. That loses people right there, because most people don’t know what ‘commercial’ means or what ‘systems’ means.”2 So Walker gives examples: A car is a system. A computer is a system. A sewing machine is a system. A casino is a system. A lever is not a system. A hammer is not a system. Anything new, he says, must be compatible with existing systems in order to be viable in the marketplace. That’s why it’s the inventor’s job to consider all the interface points in which a new system interlaces with existing ones. “The reason we use systems,” adds Walker, “is because systems are the most powerful ways in the universe to address problems.”
Two of the most recent systems inventions in the universe of entertainment serve as prime examples of this integration challenge. The digital video recorder (DVR) addresses problems common to millions of television viewers: They often miss their favorite shows, they can’t keep up with hundreds of channels, and they don’t like to waste time watching commercials. Systems such as TiVo and ReplayTV are sophisticated set-top computers that store gigabytes of programs preselected by the viewer. These machines enable the time-shifting and the avoidance of ads that viewers crave. But because television habits are governed by inertia, fewer than 2 percent of viewing households purchased these new systems in their first five years on the market.
The stumbling block is that these machines haven’t been integrated into the existing systems governing television viewership. To boost their customer base, the companies that make TiVo and ReplayTV have sought to build their technology into the set-top boxes distributed by the major cable companies. The idea is to embed the new system into the predominant system.
But as DVRs get integrated into the existing cable television system, there will be ramifications for even larger systems. What happens when forty or sixty or eighty million people start time-shifting and ad-skipping? To survive, the major broadcast networks would be forced to change their business model, perhaps turning to subscription models similar to those of the cable networks. Moreover, if advertisers of a thousand types of products have trouble reaching a mass audience in the way they’ve grown accustomed to, they might have to change the way they make and market their products. The ripple effect of a simple integration of a new system into a dominant system could be tremendous.
Another example of this kind of ripple effect is Apple Computer’s iMusic system. The problems stemming from the free downloading of copyright-protected music have been in the headlines for more than five years. Record industry officials have become, by turns, fatalistic, exasperated, and defensive, lashing out by filing lawsuits against young and old alike. “How do you compete with free?” say executives at the major music distributors.
The answer, of course, is with invention, a concept that is remarkably foreign to the recording industry, which seems to have forgotten that it was founded by Thomas Edison. As the record companies litigated and merged with one another out of fear of disappearing, Apple Computer designed an ingenious system that interlaces well with the way people actually listen to music in the Internet age. Apple struck experimental deals with all the major record companies to sell individual songs online, initially for ninety-nine cents each, and ended up selling seventy million such songs in its first year. The company not only developed the online iMusic store, but it also has distributed tens of millions of free iTunes playback programs for desktop computers, and it has sold tens of millions of its portable iPod digital music players, which hold ten thousand songs or more. While the record companies were still lamenting the end of their world, Apple was building a multibillion-dollar franchise. This systems invention adapted so well to the changing behavior patterns of consumers that the invention caught on with remarkably little friction.
Similarly, PayPal very quickly found a way to interlace its online, person-to-person payment system into eBay, the predominant system for person-to-person online auctions of collectibles and consumer goods. When they were founding PayPal, chief technology officer Max Levchin and CEO Peter Theil identified eBay as the most logical buyer of the company. Only three years after introducing their system to customers, Levchin and Theil indeed struck a deal with eBay, selling their start-up for $1.5 billion. At age twenty-seven, Levchin and the other founders were rewarded for their systems invention efforts to the tune of nine figures’ worth of eBay stock.
As all these cases show, the creation of modern systems requires that the inventors consider the most logical way the market will attempt to acquire, reject, or integrate their ideas. Dean Kamen’s Segway, for example, is a complex and radical system unto itself. Every part has a purpose, and if you remove one part, the system no longer functions as designed. But it doesn’t stand alone. And that fact may help explain why early sales have been disappointing. To make his system successful, Kamen must invent new ways of integrating it within the larger systems of society. For example, a new system needs to be developed for customers to purchase and finance the product. Very rarely will consumers pay cash for something that costs $3,000 to $5,000, but they do buy things that cost, say, $87 per month. The consumer credit system is only one system that virtually all sellers of new products must embrace in creative ways.
An unknown amount of clever system-level invention needs to happen before multitudes of Segways or its successors can coexist with, or displace, existing systems. Industrial clients, for example, can jump-start the early acceptance of a new system. In the case of electric lighting, Edison’s General Electric company got entire factories to convert from steam to electric turbines on the basis of cost, safety, and flexibility. Industrial acceptance, in turn, can drive consumer acceptance. That’s why Kamen has spent a lot of time with letter carriers, police officers, amusement park operators, and other potential large clients to find ways of matching his system to their needs, desires, mobility patterns, and existing business systems.
To popularize the automobile, Ford and other early pioneers needed to integrate their inventions into the political system, convincing government not only to pave dirt roads but also to construct a new network of interstate highways. Similarly, Kamen launched an intensive state-by-state lobbying effort to pass legislation explicitly permitting motorized vehicles such as his on sidewalks. By the time he introduced the Segway, he had been successful in twenty-six states, with others falling into line shortly thereafter.
Sales and service constitute another system. To popularize television, early makers of TV sets layered a vast network of independent dealers and repair shops on top of the existing radio dealership network. Tens of thousands of people were retrained to demonstrate the new technology for consumers and take care of the new television infrastructure. People need to test drive a product before they want it. Kamen says that’s a good analogy for what might have to happen for the Segway.
Turning to his next invention, Kamen is now marketing new systems that solve localized problems in developing nations, such as the problem of contaminated water, which kills millions of people every year. Billions of people lack electric power and clean water, and many inventors are working on this mammoth problem. Kamen’s Project Slingshot water purification and power generation system is roughly the size of a small washer and dryer. To sell or even donate these machines to families and villages in the developing world, he must interlace these systems into existing systems throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. It’s a daunting challenge, and it is going to require thinking systematically.
Geoffrey Ballard has learned about the challenges of this kind of systems integration the hard way, over the course of a decades-long struggle to transform the world’s most stubborn transportation and energy systems. Born near Niagara Falls, Ballard is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. After earning a degree in geological engineering in 1956, Ballard embarked on a career in oil exploration, working first for Shell and then for Mobil. The jobs took him to drill sites around the world, including the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. After going back to school for his Ph. D., Ballard became a civilian scientist with the U.S. Army. He worked on a wide range of research projects. He received such a high security clearance that the Pentagon would not permit him to fly on commercial airlines out of concern he would be held hostage in a terrorist hijacking.
In 1973, with Ballard working at an Army base in Arizona, the OPEC crisis hit the energy markets. Oil prices skyrocketed, and motorists nationwide lined up at service stations to buy rationed gasoline. The U.S. government created a new office of energy conservation, and Ballard was tapped as its director of research. He rented an apartment in Washington, D.C., while his wife and three sons stayed in Arizona.
Ballard was asked to create a long-term plan under which the United States would achieve energy self-sufficiency, an ambitious task of systems design. His staff studied solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal energy, hydroelectric power, and new battery technologies. He developed a range of proposals and began pitching them to politicians, but his ideas got lost in the congressional bureaucracy and went nowhere. He grew disillusioned and then disgusted. He wanted to prove that new technology could solve the problem. But the energy independence effort, he concluded, wasn’t being taken seriously. During the Watergate scandal, everyone around him seemed to lose interest.
Ballard only grew more determined. The entire system needed to change and perhaps even be replaced, he thought. To him, the main obstacle was obvious: the internal combustion engine. The transportation sector was responsible for consuming more than half the world’s crude oil and for generating about half the urban smog in U.S. cities. It was becoming clear to him that no politician had the will to fight the might of the car companies. “I didn’t think the government was going to make a concerted effort to change the internal combustion engine,” Ballard recalls. “The gestation period for developing a new energy system is twenty-five years. And there were no politicians interested in that sort of time frame.”3
Not only were his ideas for alternative energy rejected, but also he became less and less convinced that conservation was a practical answer. “Social progress is dependent on the consumption of energy,” he says. “That is a correlation that has been established since the amoeba began to emerge.” What is going to happen as the population keeps increasing and developing countries such as India and China start to generate immense numbers of people who want many of the middle-class trappings that Americans have, especially cars? Ballard became convinced that the seeds of a long-term, multidimensional, global catastrophe were being planted. “The lesson we should have learned [from the OPEC crisis] was that we were going to increase our dependence on foreign oil, and that [oil interests] were going to control our economy, and this would lead to de facto control of our foreign policy,” he says.
Ballard decided to take on the task of searching for alternative energy and transportation systems himself. In 1974, he told his wife he wanted to resign his position and his Army research post to become an inventor and entrepreneur. He was looking for a technological silver bullet, and a vision was already forming in his mind. “I thought that a fast-recharging, high-energy-density battery would be the answer,” Ballard recalls. As he points out, battery-powered cars were common before Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T. Sporting a new gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine, the Model T began proliferating rapidly beginning in 1908, and within ten years the game was over. Or was it? “I wanted to look at battery systems that might have emerged had oil not taken over,” he says. Ballard already knew the limitations—that batteries had sharply limited range and had to be recharged regularly—but he was convinced that there had to be some sort of chemical combination for creating a revolutionary new battery, one with a much higher power-to-weight ratio.
Ballard began casting about for ideas. With two colleagues, he formed Bluestar Battery Systems. The headquarters for the venture was an abandoned, dilapidated, filthy motel they purchased for $2,000. It was located south of Tucson, Arizona, near the Mexico border, in an area known as Miracle Valley, so named because a religious cult was based there. The name may have been a coincidence, but it perfectly fit the mission of the new company.4
The founders fumigated the motel and converted it into a battery invention laboratory. Their experiments centered on a cutting-edge composite based on the lightest metal, lithium. After three years of intense work, however, Ballard and his team weren’t getting anywhere. They seemed to have come up against a barrier, and they didn’t know how to get past it.
Ballard began looking for other systems to explore. He relocated the company to his native Canada and regrouped. Along with one of his partners, Keith Prater, and a new associate named Paul Howard, in 1976 Ballard formed Vancouver-based Ballard Power Systems. They put the Bluestar battery project on the back burner. Responding to a request for proposals from the Canadian National Research Council, the new company embarked on a project to research the viability of the hydrogen fuel cell, another technology that had been around for a long time but was thought to have serious limitations. Like the Stirling engine, the fuel cell was a nineteenth-century conception, and there were few viable applications. In the 1960s, for example, GE had built some for NASA’s Gemini space program. In the course of their research, Ballard and his partners became convinced that hydrogen fuel cells held even more promise than the rechargeable lightweight battery, if only they could detect the right barriers and work through them systematically.
And so this is what Ballard did—for the next quarter century and beyond. “I decided to put the company behind fuel cells and make that our major objective,” he recalls. But Ballard soon realized that the barriers were not only technological. There were business barriers, economic barriers, political barriers, and social, behavioral, logistical, and financial barriers. He was determined to do whatever it took to think systematically about replacing the internal combustion engine with the fuel cell, to get an entire society to give up crude oil and embrace hydrogen.
First, Ballard needed proof of the concept. He put an initial team of four engineers on the fuel cell. Quite simply, fuel cells work through electrochemistry rather than combustion. There’s no piston or any other moving parts, and there are no exhaust fumes containing pollutants. The only inputs are hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air, and the only outputs are electricity and water. Ballard’s proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell uses thin electrodes to split the hydrogen into electrons and protons. The electrodes sit on either side of the membrane, essentially a plastic-like film. Only the protons can travel through the membrane on their way to combining with the oxygen to form water. The blocked electrons, meanwhile, are released. These moving electrons are the electricity that powers a motor.
The technology worked in the laboratory. But like any source of power, fuel cells needed to be made efficient and economical. It was all about power density, boosting the power-to-weight ratio, decreasing the size so that dozens of units could be easily stacked together, and finding ways to make engines as cheaply as possible. The Ballard team made an astounding amount of headway in these areas in its first few years, leading Geoffrey Ballard to believe they could build a fuel-cell-powered bus. “Nobody really wanted to do the bus except me,” he recalls. “I didn’t see any other way of demonstrating to the public what we could do with a fuel cell vehicle. We needed money. And it would be a long time before we’d ever make a profit. I persuaded everyone that this is something we could do.”
The day in 1983 that Geoffrey Ballard drove the fuel cell bus through the streets of Vancouver was one of the proudest days of his life. A framed photo of the original Ballard bus taken on that day still hangs in his house. The photo shows the hydrogen fuel tanks sitting on a roof compartment, with the stacks of fuel cells fitted into the back of the vehicle. Politicians, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens came to see it in action. Ballard presided over a ceremony in which champagne glasses were filled with the exhaust water from the bus. The politicians and the engineers toasted as they drank the exhaust. On that day, Ballard declared, “We’ve seen the beginning of the end of the internal combustion engine.”
Ballard became the leading voice for the fuel cell, and his approach was to cajole Detroit and Japan into seeing things his way. “You’ll run into a point here when you’ll find I’m at odds with the car industry,” he says. He began calling those who disagreed with him “pistonheads.” But his invention teams continued to make steady progress, to the point that the auto companies started coming around to the concept. “By the time we put out the bus, we were getting three to five kilowatts per cubic foot [of engine volume],” he says. “We do ten times that now.”
Daimler Benz was the first to license the technology and build a prototype fuel cell car. It debuted in 1995. Toyota and Honda also became customers and built their own models. So did Ford. There was a crush of posturing and prototyping and a struggle for power over the new technology. Ballard Power Systems formed joint ventures with both Ford and the newly merged DaimlerChrysler. (Ballard Power would later acquire both ventures outright in exchange for providing the two auto giants with a combined 44 percent ownership stake in the parent company.) All this provided validation. Geoffrey Ballard had challenged a powerful system, and the system had come to him. Vancouver was positioned to become the new Detroit.
That turned out to be a problem. The car companies that came on board wanted to turn Ballard into a manufacturing company. Geoffrey Ballard wanted to keep focusing solely on invention, R&D, and building the patent portfolio, keeping his company relatively small and licensing the technology to the big automakers. He knew that manufacturing would require a huge amount of capital, with little chance of payoff in the short term, and he wanted the auto giants themselves to take on the cost and risk of manufacturing.
Geoffrey Ballard lost this power struggle. When it was over, he resigned from the company that still bears his name. He no longer sits on the board of directors. “I felt the company was making the wrong moves,” he says. “I felt that Ballard should be a technological company. Management felt they should become a manufacturing company, going head-to-head with General Motors. That’s a completely different approach. That’s why I didn’t want to stay around.”
A visit to the headquarters of Ballard Power Systems in suburban Burnaby, British Columbia, reveals that the company is struggling to remain a world leader in hydrogen fuel cells. The massive R&D center is overflowing with evidence that the technology is still moving forward, but Geoffrey Ballard disputes whether it’s advancing fast enough, and he says that the most cutting-edge innovation is now happening elsewhere. Nevertheless, cool prototype cars sit in the vast lobby. Dozens of researchers are scampering around from project to project. Engineers here can demonstrate a stationary, 29-pound fuel cell unit that can power a home with 1.2 kilowatts of electricity, as well as a 212-pound fuel cell engine that can power a small car with 85 kilowatts of electricity. The company continues to pile up patents. “There’s still room for breakthroughs to happen,” says David Wilkinson, director of R&D.5 He sees fuel cells getting smaller, lighter, and more powerful, in a process not unlike the trajectory of personal computers.
Across a giant parking lot filled with internal combustion vehicles, the finishing touches are being put on a massive manufacturing facility. Ballard Power’s entry into large-scale manufacturing has indeed required massive investment. Its losses have been escalating, to nearly $200 million in its most recent fiscal year. So much money had to be raised that the company was forced to dilute the value of its stock. Investors haven’t been happy. The CEO was ousted and replaced. And the big payoff still seems to be a decade away. It’s clear that the company will be at the mercy of its largest investors: Ford and Daimler. The big auto companies are really running the show, learning everything about the technology while keeping the expenses of building it off their own balance sheets.
Geoffrey Ballard credits the company with making him what he is today: bitter and angry about what happened. He wants to see his namesake remain viable, but he has moved on to the bigger issues. Now in his early seventies, the gray-haired Ballard is just as active as ever. He plays tennis to keep in shape, and he’s still inventing, but at the system level rather than the engineering level. Along with his old partner, Paul Howard, he runs a start-up company, General Hydrogen, also based near Vancouver. The new company doesn’t make or market fuel cells. “I don’t work on fuel cells,” he says. “If we need fuel cells, we buy them. I don’t want any possibility of conflict of interest.”6
Instead, Ballard researches and designs systems, specifically the overall structures that are required if we are to make the grand switch to the “hydrogen economy” that Ballard envisions more clearly than ever. This more expansive mission energizes him. “We’ve changed the way people think about power,” he says. “We’ve got the entire automotive industry convinced that there is going to be a new engine, a new fuel. It’s an amazing thing to have achieved. We’re educating people about the hydrogen economy. We’ve demonstrated that you don’t have to have the internal combustion engine polluting our cities. Nor do we have to have the United States dependent on foreign oil. Since September 11, that also means you don’t have to have the same fuel threatening homeland security.”
Taking it to the next level requires systematic thinking of the highest order. Now that fuel cell systems work well, there are at least three major systems that need to be designed to make everything come together: hydrogen fuel production, hydrogen fuel delivery, and vehicle management and maintenance. Hydrogen is one of the most plentiful substances on Earth, but it comes bundled as part of other things, such as water. Hydrogen isn’t free. Other forms of energy are required in order to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen through, for example, electrolysis. Hydrogen can be refined as a solid, a liquid, or a compressed gas. But what are the best energy sources to produce the fuel in the first place?
Options are plentiful. Obviously, it would be counterproductive to use oil. Coal is also a poor choice, given the pollution factor. Methanol and natural gas can be reformulated into hydrogen, and these are realistic alternatives, given an abundant domestic supply. But Geoffrey Ballard prefers nuclear power, which now quietly supplies 17 percent of the world’s electricity. He knows that the safety issues are still politically sensitive in the United States, but he believes that the fear is irrational and overblown. Hydrogen production plants, he notes, need not be located near population centers. In any case, all the sources we’ve mentioned can be used, and the various ways of making hydrogen fuel can be ramped up or phased out as desired, with no effect on the vehicles or the home power units themselves. That’s not true with oil, which must be made through geothermal pressure over centuries.
Building a system for delivering and dispensing hydrogen is also a huge undertaking. “It’s a Catch-22,” Ballard says. “You can’t sell fuel cell vehicles unless there is an infrastructure for refueling. And you can’t persuade the oil industry to put a hydrogen refueling station at every gas station until there are customers to drive in and buy the hydrogen.” Once this system is designed, however, hydrogen will likely cost the same as gasoline, he says. But it’s better than gas for three reasons: There are no limits on supply, consuming it causes no pollution, and it’s twice as efficient as gasoline, so the car can go twice as far on the same tank.
The third big system is a gnarly constellation of safety and liability issues. The driving public will need to be retrained to care for and operate new kinds of vehicles. To work out the kinks, Ballard has always maintained that he wants centrally managed fleets of buses and trucks to be the first to convert to hydrogen. From a pollution perspective, replacing one big rig is equal to replacing one hundred cars. After doing that, we’ll know more about handling any safety risks, such as installing proper ventilation in garages and making sure that people don’t smoke near hydrogen fuel tanks in enclosed areas.
This systematic thinking about the coming hydrogen economy isn’t a theoretical exercise. Ballard has brought in a strategic partner, General Motors, to fund and execute his new systems invention effort. Under a twenty-five-year partnership, the auto giant has made a “strategic investment” in General Hydrogen. Led by R&D vice president Lawrence Burns, GM has created the industry’s most radical design of a fuel cell vehicle. Known as the Hy-wire car, it has more in common with a laptop computer than a traditional automobile. Except for wheels and a place for passengers to sit, everything else about this vehicle is new. The entire engine block under the hood has been eliminated, replaced by a safety system. The car doesn’t have a drive train; instead, it has a “drive-by-wire” system for steering, braking, and throttling. The entire body can be unhitched from its “skateboard”—which includes the wheels, fuel cells, and fuel tanks—and replaced with another body. GM’s Burns considers the fuel cell a disruptive technology, and he is in a position to do something about it before it’s too late. “The goal is to reinvent the automobile and reinvent the industry,” says the GM executive. In fact, he sees the transportation and power industries merging into one.7
The ramifications for other systems are virtually endless. Because a car requires far greater bursts of power than does a home, a fuel cell engine sitting idle in a garage could literally power a house. Indeed, it could probably power the entire block. “If only one in twenty-five cars in California were fuel cell cars,” says Ballard, “it would exceed the entire capacity of state’s electricity grid.”8 Both Ballard and Burns agree that homes of the future will likely generate their own power, obviating the need for the home to be hooked up to the electrical grid, an especially attractive option for developing countries. Another option is to use electricity from the grid to produce hydrogen fuel in your garage. If any of this happens, other large technological and social systems will have to change dramatically. By thinking systematically, inventors could generate hundreds of inventions and ideas that people will need in such a world.
The ultimate system is the biological system. That the human body is a system of systems has been known for ages. The respiratory system, the circulatory system, the immune system, the cardiovascular system, the neurological system, the metabolic system—all these and more have been identified and studied extensively, but mainly on the level of the cells and molecules that constitute them. “In a general sense, biological systems have been understood for one hundred years,” says Leroy Hood.9
Three fairly recent developments, however, have given rise to the possibility of thinking systematically—holistically—about the human body in a far more profound way than ever before. First, there’s the mapping of the entire human genome, a project that was completed ahead of most predictions, thanks in large part to the inventions of Hood and his colleagues. The massive gene sequencing endeavor has yielded a fine-grained “parts list” of the genetic codes that program the workings of those systems, says Hood.
Second is the Internet, which globalized biological invention to an unprecedented level, enabling far-flung groups of investigators to use and contribute to mind-blowing arrays of biological data. “The Internet gave us the ability to deal with an enormous global set of data,” Hood says.
Third, the transdisciplinary approach that Hood helped pioneer is finally catching on. “We need to invent new technology, new math, and we need to integrate everything with biology and medicine,” he notes. “We need people who speak this new common language.”
This new language is the language of systems. In Hood’s view, the new systems approach to biology has such radical implications that to pursue it, entirely new types of organizations are required. Even though he created a cross-disciplinary department at the University of Washington, Hood became convinced that he could no longer work within the confines of a university, with its rigid tenure, employment, and intellectual property policies governing work with other institutions. When he decided to leave, in 1999, the man who had invested the money to establish Hood’s department there wasn’t happy. “Bill Gates said to me, ‘Isn’t there any way of working this out?’ I said, ‘No, systems biology creates a completely different culture. It’s different in every dimension.’”
That’s why Hood and two other UW researchers—Alan Aderem and Ruedi Aebersold—left to establish the nonprofit Institute for Systems Biology, and it’s why Hood now spends much of his time raising tens of millions of dollars in government grants and private donations to keep it going. Housed in a three-story brick building overlooking Seattle’s Lake Union, the institute is located near the university campus for a good reason: It employs many of the school’s students and graduates. All three floors of the institute are populated by people who are smart, young, and typically sport white lab coats and green gloves. They’re laboring away at lab benches, analyzing mysterious-looking liquids using a wide array of sophisticated machinery, especially DNA sequencing and analysis instruments. Presiding over his new place, Lee Hood is finally doing exactly what he wants in exactly the way he wants. Nearly a half century after becoming fascinated with the double helix, Hood says that the really exciting stuff is being invented now.
The history of medicine, he says, has been about diagnosing and treating disease. The future, by contrast, is all about predicting and preventing disease. We already know that gene sequencing is the key to unlocking the secrets of each person’s biological systems. So if you know the basic code, you can invent the ultimate form of healthcare: personalized medicine. These days, Hood says, we can sequence an entire human genome one hundred times as fast as his original gene machines could do, and at half the price. “In ten to twelve years,” he says, “we’ll be sequencing entire genomes in twenty minutes for under $1,000.” He cautions, however, that many companies will claim that they have this technology before it’s ready, and so patients need to make sure that both the maternal and the paternal chromosomes are being mapped out for the data to be meaningful.
The implications of this technology are astounding: “We’ll be able to look at thousands of genes that may predispose you to late-onset diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease,” he says. “We’ll be able to write out for you a predictive health history, what your course is likely to be if unperturbed. It might say you have a 60 percent chance of getting prostate cancer at age sixty-five, or a 30 percent change of getting cardiovascular disease at forty-five.” The way Hood sees it, these genetic reports should be available for everyone. “Everyone will get them,” he says. “Everyone will be able to get this readout. It will be paid for by health insurance because it will save everyone a lot of money.”
Like Geoffrey Ballard’s hydrogen economy, Hood’s vision triggers systematic thinking of the most radical kind. Inventors listen for these triggers. They are compelled to spend their time imagining what this new world will be like. To do this, you need to go right back to the beginning of the cycle of thinking strategies: creating new opportunities, pinpointing new problems, recognizing new patterns, detecting new barriers, and so forth.
Hood has no doubt that the new systems approach to biology will not only spawn hundreds of lucrative new companies but will also render today’s giant pharmaceutical companies obsolete. “There will be enormous intellectual property generated from this,” he says. “It will spin out a whole series of new companies. The pharmaceutical industry won’t be able to do systems biology. They are too siloized,” meaning that they are separated into isolated divisions. He adds, “They are too driven by immediate profit. They don’t hire cross-disciplinary people.” He foresees the industry moving from its current state of vertical integration—in which the corporations discover, develop, test, and market every kind of drug—to one of horizontal integration, in which corporations do only one of these tasks, but they do it across an entire systems domain. Instead of GlaxoSmithKline, we’ll have Heart Systems Corp.
Getting down to the business of creating this new world, Hood returns to the advice that his mentor, Bill Dreyer, gave him forty years ago: Always practice biology at the leading edge, and if you want to change biology, invent a new technology. One opportunity that Hood and many others have created in their minds is the idea of capturing an instantaneous genetic health snapshot of an individual, to see whether any genes are mutating and whether any cancers might be forming in the near future. Doing this requires the invention of something new. “If you ask me what the technology of the future will be in biological medicine,” Hood says, “it is utterly clear: microfluidics coupled with nanotechnology.”
That may sound complex, but it’s just a systematic approach to the problem of getting an instant genetic health status report. To obtain tremendous amounts of information from tiny samples of blood, you create groups of submicroscopic robots, essentially reducing an entire laboratory to the size of a fingernail. And so that is the invention effort that Lee Hood has instigated. This new project is being conducted as an alliance between his institute, UCLA, and Hood’s alma matter, Caltech. Based at a hospital in Pasadena, the NanoSystems Biology Alliance is led by physicists Stephen Quake and Michael Roukes, chemist James Heath, PET scan inventor Michael Phelps, and prostate cancer expert Charles Sawyers. The project was launched with a $20 million annual budget, and the group is already testing nanochips less than one hundred microns wide—smaller than the dot made by a pencil.
The goal is to invent something akin to a true “cell” phone. “We’re working on a systems biology nanochip that’s going to be able to take thousands or even tens of thousands of measurements from proteins and RNA molecules,” Hood says. “In five to ten years, you’ll have a small, handheld device. It will prick your finger, take a small amount of blood, take those ten thousand measurements, plug them in to the Internet, go to a server, and analyze and test those ten thousand elements against one another. So it gives you a ten thousand dimensional space, which is incredibly sensitive to change. That will determine your instant health status.”
Naturally, this technology has already led to a vast new category of discovery and invention: the therapies that repair, correct, or modify our genes before any symptoms appear. We need to find new ways to flip our bits.
Inventors typically shy away from making bold predictions about the future. As the saying goes, it’s easier and safer to invent the future than to predict it. Inventors are often so caught up with pinpointing problems, overcoming barriers, crossing boundaries, analogizing and visualizing that they often don’t see the point in making wild claims about where everything is heading. But Leroy Hood is so confident of the end result that he matter-of-factly makes this prophecy: This new systems approach to medicine will extend the average human life span by ten to thirty years. If he’s right, we or our children may be the world’s first mass generation of people who live past a hundred. If so, we are going to cause a lot of problems. Luckily, we may have some extra time to invent our way out of them.