Talk About Inspirational

Every year Angelo State has an event called the Moon Lecture where they bring in a top rate scientist to speak on different issues. The night before the lectures, they have an informal BBQ where faculty and certain students can hear the life story of the speaker, meet them, and ask questions. Having just arrived at school, this was my first time to attend.

This year the speaker is Leroy Hood. (And see more on Wikipedia).

He’s a systems biologist who is credited with creating the DNA sequencer, amoung other things. All you lab rats out there who love looking at DNA sequences to study evolution have Dr. Hood to thank. He’s also been involved with the Human Genome Project, various immunology projects, and a host of other biotechnology projects.

He basically spoke of his childhood (grew up in Montana) and how his interest in science was nurtured by parents and childhood teachers. One of those high school teachers convinced him to attend Cal Tech, where he arrived in 1960. He said it was the biggest culture shock of his life. Upon arriving, his roommate asked him if he’d taken some course (cancer research? — I don’t remember). “Not only had I not taken the course, I’d never heard of it.” “You’re in big trouble then, you’re not going to make it,” his roommate responded. Dr. Hood said that his roommate had failed out the first semester from playing 20 hours of bridge a day. Though I’ve never played bridge, I get the idea that it would be an emmensely more enjoyable way to fail out of college than 20 hours of video games a day, as my peers do now.

He spoke of how accessible his professors at Cal Tech were. My jaw dropped when I heard some of his teachers his freshman year. Richard Feynman for physics, Linus Pauling for chemistry, and George Beadle for biology. He had the attention of every single person in the room.

Tomorrow he’ll be giving two lectures which I will attend. As I mentioned, his interest is systems biology. I think it’s essentially the question of how we manage the information we’re getting. When you think about the amount of information contained in the genome and the interactions going on in a biological system, we’ve gotten to the point where we need ways to condense that information and think about it conceptually. Dr. Hood mentioned that medical school was a big disappointment to him because of the rote memorization and the lack of conceptual interest. (Yeah, I personally call it the dark side of biology). I believe his talks will center upon the work being done in these areas.

I’ll take notes and present the highlights. I’m very much looking forward to it.