Anita Goel, MD, PhD, is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nanobiosym and a scientist, physicist-physician, inventor, and global entrepreneur. Dr. Goel was awarded the 2013 X Prize for her contributions to the emerging field of nanobiophysics and her inventions for Gene-RADAR®. She has been named among the “World’s Top Science and Technology innovators” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine, “Top 10 Women to Watch in Tech” by Inc., and one of the “56 Companies That Are Changing the World” by the Boston Globe, among numerous other honors and awards.
I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, while my dad was completing his surgical residency. At the age of three, my parents and I moved to the little rural town of Prentiss, Mississippi, where my dad was heavily recruited to be the local town surgeon. A few years earlier, President John F. Kennedy had increased the quota of visas for foreign-trained medical graduates to help fill the desperate need for more qualified doctors to serve rural America.
My parents had emigrated from India to pursue the American Dream. We landed in the Deep South of the early 1970s, where black and white people still lived on different sides of the railroad tracks. On my first day of prekindergarten (without any effort on my part), I made local history for the little town of Prentiss by becoming the first nonwhite child to attend its all-white, racially segregated school and Southern Baptist Church. At that young age, I learned not only how easy it was to make history, but also how to survive and thrive at the nexus of many different worlds and silos that did not talk to each other.
In Mississippi, I recall spending a lot of time outdoors meditating in nature, studying the likes of Einstein, Tesla, and Swami Vivekananda, and wondering about the deep mysteries of the universe. I found myself on both an inner and outer quest to discover truth and meaning in the universe, breaking down the silos between my natural curiosity-driven scientific quest to understand the world around me, and my deep inner spiritual yearnings and meditations to know Truth and realize the Self.
I loved physics and mathematics, for they provided me a window through which I could realize a deeper understanding of, and appreciation for, nature. On the other hand, I was exposed to the practical real-world problems of biology and medicine. I would often accompany my dad into his operation theaters and on his rounds at the hospital. By age eight, I was an MD in my own mind. I became convinced that there must be an underlying unity in nature and that the same physics that we use to understand the far reaches of the universe must be applicable to understanding life and living systems and tackling the problems of biomedicine.
However, the deeper I went in my academic pursuits in physics and medicine, first at Stanford for my BS in physics and then at Harvard for an MD and MIT for a PhD in physics, the more aware I became of just how deeply disjointed these seemingly orthogonal fields were in our modern scientific paradigm. Modern physics was developed primarily in the last century in the context of inanimate matter and had not really come to terms with life and consciousness. Modern medicine was currently practiced chiefly at the level of molecular biology and chemistry and had not yet addressed the role that physics plays in fundamental physiological processes.
Once again, I found myself at the nexus of two fascinating worlds that did not talk to each other. In my quest to find an underlying unified framework to bring physics and life on the same footing, I found that the new field of nanotechnology could help me bridge these silos. I was very fortunate along the way to have wonderful mentors, including Nobel Laureates Steve Chu and Dudley Herschbach, who enthusiastically encouraged my curiosity and helped me further this deeper quest by finding practical ways to channel it to advance the frontier of science.
Over the past twenty years, I have been deeply fascinated with the problem of molecular nanomachines that read and write information into DNA and how their real-time dynamics could be studied and controlled using rigorous concepts and experimental tools from physics and nanotechnology. My own theoretical physics work had been focused on extending the framework of modern physics to describe the interplay of matter, energy, and information, but I needed an experimental way to prove my theories. For me, these nanomotors provided a living laboratory to probe the physics of life and experimentally investigate the interplay of matter, energy, and information at the nanoscale. I had been dreaming for years of ways to harness these nanomachines for various breakthrough technological applications.
In 2004, while still in the midst of completing my clinical training at Mass General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s as part of the Harvard-MIT and HST MD-PhD Medical Scientist Training Program, I received a chance call from a team of U.S. military and DARPA officers looking to develop next-generation capabilities for pathogen detection for unanticipated threats like anthrax, bioterrorism, and pandemic outbreaks like SARS. They wanted to summon the nation’s leading experts across various silos to help tackle these threats to national security. They needed someone who had a “hard-core” physical science background and understood clinical medicine and pathogens and the new field of nanotechnology.
After two hours of intense questioning by an expert panel about my ideas and my relevant expertise, they offered me funding to demonstrate proof of concept of some of my ideas. They also added that they believed I would fail, but wanted to bet on me anyway. When I inquired why they thought I would fail, they explained that the project was very difficult and that they were not giving me enough money or time to achieve the proposed seven milestones; from their perspective, the odds were stacked against me, but because they saw the potential breakthrough nature of the innovation I was proposing, as well as my stellar track record of extraordinary achievements at such a young age, they were willing to take a bet on me despite these odds.
I asked if they were willing to wait until after I completed my six months of clinical work, which was a sixty to eighty hour-a-week work commitment in the hospitals. They said they could not wait and gave me a few minutes to decide whether I wanted to “take it or leave it.” Since I was in a military building with no access to call my family, mentors, and advisors for their advice, I decided to meditate and go to that inner space to make my decision.
I said yes to the offer, and six months later, we achieved all seven milestones and two additional ones, resulting in the U.S. government doubling our funding and leading to multiple awards from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Energy, and the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. This series of awards helped me to launch the Nanobiosym Research Institute and Incubator in 2004. A few years later, we spun out Nanobiosym Diagnostics to develop and commercialize Gene-RADAR® as a platform for mobilizing, decentralizing, and personalizing the next generation of health care.
I am grateful for visionary organizations like DARPA for investing early on in some of my dreams and providing me with the opportunity to make a quantum leap to manifest those dreams into a reality.
Nearly a decade later, our company Nanobiosym Diagnostics is poised to take the next quantum leap by creating a paradigm shift in global health care that will disrupt the centralized model of the health care industry. Our flagship product, Gene-RADAR®, is a mobile diagnostic platform about the size of an iPad that provides anyone-anytime-anywhere instant access to personalized information about their own health. What Google did for the information industry and what cell phones did for the telecom industry, Nanobiosym is doing for health care. By decentralizing the infrastructure needed to diagnose and manage disease, it will democratize access to health care on a global scale, empowering individuals to take ownership over their own health and providing access to the more than four billion people who currently lack even basic health care.
I strongly believe disruptive technologies alone are not enough to drive the revolution in global health care; we need an entire ecosystem of early adopters and change agents to pilot and integrate these next-gen technologies. Engineering the ecosystem is just as important as the physics and nanotechnology engineering. We stand at a moment in history where innovative technologies and forward-looking thinkers will change the world as we know it by continuing to pursue convergent paths that can work in harmony to provide new opportunities to disrupt our current worldview.
I believe that the next generations of breakthrough innovation and quantum leaps in our science, technology, industries, and humanitarian impact will come at the holistic convergence of traditional silos. The deeper mission of my life and the organizations that I have founded is to infuse a higher level of consciousness in our science, technology, business, and humanitarian impact.