Colin Hill

Photographer: Blaise Hayward

CEO, President, and Cofounder, Gene Network Sciences Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The discovery of DNA, as well as advanced computing and the Internet.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Systems biology, which is the convergence of computing and genetic information, and the global sharing and processing of information.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The Internet.

"As a physicist, I studied phase transitions in physical systems. There's an emergence from all these interacting microscopic degrees of freedom—as with ice melting—that causes systems to transform, often in surprising ways. The analogies to biology were obvious: nonlinear interactions between all of these genes and proteins, which are dead components, somehow give rise to a living cell.

"When the Human Genome Project came along, we finally got the parts list, but it was not enough to make discoveries or to understand the system as an integrated whole. It was clear that to make use of all of the data for discovering new drugs, very sophisticated computational techniques were going to have to be employed.

"Our understanding of medicine is still incredibly crude. In the next three to five years, we will see a major transformation in our ability to predict and understand and modulate biological systems with drugs. This will derive from a predictive understanding of biological systems. Physics worked because it let us predict and understand properties from the micro level of the computer chip to the very large scale that allows us to send a satellite probe to Mars. This kind of understanding and control has not yet come to biology, but it is coming, and it will be the greatest revolution in the next century."