Leroy Hood, who was awarded the 2004 Biotechnology Heritage Award, is one of the world’s leading contributors to biotechnology and genomics. Hood’s professional career began in 1970 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he and his colleagues developed four automated technologies—the protein sequencer, the protein synthesizer, the DNA sequencer, and the DNA synthesizer—that constitute the technological foundation for contemporary molecular biotechnology and genomics by allowing the rapid automated construction and sequencing of DNA and protein. The DNA sequencer, in particular, revolutionized DNA-sequencing studies and made possible the Human Genome Project. Hood moved to the University of Washington in 1991 to form the interdisciplinary Department of Molecular Biotechnology, an amalgam of biologists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and computer scientists.
Hood is president and cofounder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, a nonprofit research institute established to pioneer systems approaches to biology and medicine. He has also cofounded numerous biotechnology companies including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin, Rosetta, and MacroGenics.
Hood earned an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Caltech in 1968. He has published more than five hundred peer-reviewed papers and coauthored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics. Hood also played a pioneering role in deciphering the secrets of antibody diversity and coedited Code of Codes, a book about scientific, social, and ethical issues raised by genetic research.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Association of Arts and Sciences, Hood’s many awards and honors include the Lasker Award in 1987 for studies on the mechanism of immune diversity, the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology in 2002, and the Lemelson-MIT Prize for Invention and Innovation in 2003. Hood has maintained a lifelong commitment to making science accessible and understandable to the general public, especially to children.
