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"  Originally published in our April 2011 issue There may be another scientist in the world as smart as Eric Schadt. After all, scientists are a pretty smart lot, even though you&amp;#039;d be surprised at how few want to change the world, and how many of them have the trudging souls of brilliant, dutiful clerks. There may even be another scientist in the world as popular, as in demand as Eric Schadt, even though Eric works hard at everything he does, including his popularity, and is engaged, at any given time, in at least ten collaborations with other top scientists, not to mention the production \u2014 just last year \u2014 of a profligate thirty-five scientific papers, not to mention the delivery, year in and year out, of about forty talks and presentations after receiving invitations to deliver two or three hundred. (You&amp;#039;d also be surprised by how social a lot of scientists are, and how many parties they go to.) But if you&amp;#039;re looking for a scientist whose great popularity rests in tirelessly writing papers and delivering speeches whose implicit and sometimes explicit message to the most eminent minds in his field is that they&amp;#039;re wrong, that they&amp;#039;ve failed, and that the best way for them to stop wasting their lives is to follow him in a scientific revolution that he admits might not even work: Well, then you&amp;#039;d probably have to narrow your search a little bit. It takes a pretty smart guy to tell the smartest people in the world that all their success, all their hard-won knowledge has led them to a dead end ... that the approach they&amp;#039;ve taken has been a little, um, simplistic. It takes Eric Schadt to say that \u2014 and then to make the damned sale. What&amp;#039;s he selling? Well, the first way to answer that is to say what he&amp;#039;s not selling. He&amp;#039;s not selling molecular biology. He&amp;#039;s not selling the last big revolution in biology, the revolution that made biology the dominant science of our time and was supposed to save us. The Human Genome Project, which at a cost of about $3 billion mapped the twenty-three thousand or so genes that are said to encode all of human existence? That&amp;#039;s molecular biology, man \u2014 its signal triumph, its apotheosis, the culmination of an effort that began with the elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule, picked up speed and funding with the War on Cancer, and then, well, figured everything out for us, from the causes of cancer to the roots of belief. (Hint: They&amp;#039;re both in the genes, which govern our biology by the proteins they express.) And so we believed. We believed that in our genes was the code for not just our proteins but our fates; we believed what we read in the newspapers and heard on television, that a gene for this had been found, or a gene for that; and we believed above all that if a cause for a certain disease had been discovered, then a cure had to be on the way. Indeed, without quite knowing it, we believed in the logic of molecular biology, its inexorable momentum, which we equated with scientific progress itself. The logic was this: one gene at a time. One gene at a time, we&amp;#039;d triumph over disease, and if we figured out the right gene, the right protein, and the right pathway between genes and proteins, maybe we&amp;#039;d even triumph over death itself. How triumphant was molecular biology? It was so triumphant that we believed in it (and still believe in it) even when it has gone a long way toward bankrupting the pharmaceutical industry with drugs like the painkiller Vioxx and the diabetes medication Avandia \u2014 drugs that hit their molecular targets but also cause catastrophic side effects by hitting other unforeseen targets as well \u2014 or drugs that never come close to making it to market at all. We still believe in it even when nearly ten years after the mapping of the genome, it has radically increased the cost of drug development while delivering next to nothing in return. That&amp;#039;s right: nothing. Oh, sure, knowledge, yes. Humans know more about the workings of individual genes, proteins, pathways, and kinds of cells than we ever have. We know so much that surely all we need is time. Because one gene at a time takes time. And drug discovery takes time. And FDA approval takes time, gobs of time, epochal engines of time ... and now here comes Eric Schadt saying, Don&amp;#039;t hold your breath. Here comes Eric Schadt saying that time isn&amp;#039;t the problem with molecular biology \u2014 molecular biology is. Reductionism is. Willful oversimplification is. The very idea that humanity can enlist the aid of grunting lab-coated Sherpas and march toward pharmaceutical nirvana one gene at a time is. Here comes Eric Schadt saying, &amp;quot;All right, so the idea was that understanding individual proteins and their missions could open up our understanding of the complexity of living systems. That&amp;#039;s failed. That&amp;#039;s turned out not to be true. And that was the dream, right? So it&amp;#039;s a crisis. We understand simple processes, but we have no idea how simple processes fit into larger processes.&amp;quot; You get that? Molecular biology \u2014 the great scientific god of our age, not just the answer to but the explanation for our prayers \u2014 in crisis! Not true! A failure! Dead wrong! No wonder that a few years ago, Schadt gave one of his talks at Columbia and five minutes into the speech, a gray biological eminence stood up and said (in Eric&amp;#039;s telling), &amp;quot;How dare you dismiss all the biology that has made us so successful today? My recommendation to everyone in this audience is not to listen to what this man has to say.&amp;quot;  The gentleman then turned and walked out, in front of a few hundred people. But here&amp;#039;s the deal: Everybody else stayed. And listened. Because you see, at the time, Eric Schadt was working for Merck and was already getting a reputation as the guy who was remaking Merck from the inside out. And because Schadt&amp;#039;s not just (or even) a critic, not some apocalyptic scold. He&amp;#039;s funny. He&amp;#039;s a real character. He&amp;#039;s the life of the party, with a line of bullshit he likes to call bullshit, a mad motormouthed charisma that he combines with a mad cackling awareness of the absurdity of all intellectual endeavor, especially his own. He has a shtick, a pitch, but he also has a vision, and that&amp;#039;s what he&amp;#039;s selling, with evangelical fervor. And the vision, basically, is this: Okay, so focusing on one gene at a time doesn&amp;#039;t work, doesn&amp;#039;t explain what causes disease, indeed falsifies the causes of disease and makes it nearly impossible to develop the drugs we need to cure it. So how about focusing on thousands of genes at a time? How about focusing on thousands of genes and thousands of proteins with some enzymes and environmental factors thrown in for good measure? How about getting bigger instead of getting smaller? How about going for complexity instead of simplicity? How about implicating not single genes and single pathways of proteins in disease but whole vast networks of genes and proteins \u2014 networks that have been invisible to us until now? How about taking advantage of the technology and the data that&amp;#039;s become available over the past ten years and using it to create models of the living world that are nearly as complex as the living world itself and by God nearly as large? Oh, sure, it sounds impossible. Maybe it is impossible. But that&amp;#039;s why Eric Schadt wants not just to remake the underpinnings of biological science but rather to remake science itself \u2014 the way it&amp;#039;s done. Okay, so the complexity of living systems \u2014 and the amount of data they generate \u2014 turns out to be too much for even the most heroic of individual scientists to master. All right then: Biologists have to form networks that mimic the biological networks they&amp;#039;re studying. The networks between genes and proteins turn out to be organized socially, like human networks, and so human social networks will be required to understand them ... with Eric Schadt at their center.   Basically, most anecdotes about Eric Schadt involve the two things that have enabled him to be both highly connected and a revolutionary \u2014 smarts and salesmanship. For example, here&amp;#039;s how he met his wife. He was a graduate student at UC Davis, going for his Ph.D. in pure mathematics. Pure math is the hardest, most abstract and conceptually demanding discipline you can find, which is why Eric was studying it, and why a young woman named Jennifer Harkness one night gave him a call. She was a freshman with nothing to do, and she and her friends were making prank phone calls. The phone rang, Eric picked it up, and he heard a voice say, &amp;quot;Hi, this is Jenny.&amp;quot; He said instantly, &amp;quot;Hi, Jenny \u2014 is this a prank phone call?&amp;quot; Jenny and her friends started screaming; they couldn&amp;#039;t figure how he&amp;#039;d figured out what they were doing. He explained that he was an inveterate prank caller himself \u2014 he liked calling seismologists and telling them that he was feeling tremors \u2014 and when Jennifer stayed on the line, he found out that she was, like him, from Michigan, and they had some things in common... . He made the sale, in other words, and now he and Jennifer live in Palo Alto, California, with their five blond kids, the big sprawling brood that inevitably causes other scientists to remark, &amp;quot;Oh, you&amp;#039;re an optimist!&amp;quot; when he tells them about it and also prompts him to articulate an elemental personal philosophy when he&amp;#039;s sitting at his big dining-room table one morning, trying to finish another of his groundbreaking papers while bouncing his five-year-old daughter in his lap and at the same time checking his oldest son&amp;#039;s math homework \u2014 &amp;quot;I can never do too much of anything. Bring it on, baby.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s forty-six years old, and he has the moonfaced swagger of a former child star, albeit one who grew up to be a football blocking back. He&amp;#039;s stocky and strong, with a knobby nose and an imposingly lumpy brow and a disheveled head of brown hair spit-curled to his forehead by the sweat induced by his Herculean labors. Think Jack Black in a white lab coat and you get the picture ... except that he doesn&amp;#039;t wear a lab coat. He&amp;#039;s developed his own standardized scientific uniform \u2014 a white tennis shirt with a dark-blue Polo insignia and a pair of hiking shorts \u2014 and he wears it as faithfully as Steve Jobs wears blue jeans and a black mock turtleneck. He wears it when you see him in the morning and he wears it when you see him at night, so that you don&amp;#039;t really know if he&amp;#039;s ever gone to sleep or ever changed, and he even wears it when he takes his motorcycle to work, though the motorcycle is to motorcycles exactly what Eric Schadt is to biology \u2014 a baroque exaggeration of normal capabilities that either promises deliverance or threatens obliteration. But let Eric, who&amp;#039;s something of a gearhead in both the civilian and scientific aspects of his life, describe the specifications of the BMW S 1000 RR:  &amp;quot;Four hundred pounds, 200 horsepower, the fastest thing out there, zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds, the first superbike.&amp;quot; Well, at least he wears a helmet \u2014 and not just a helmet but a big black-visored one with a video camera rigged on top so that he can record the sublime experience of riding his superbike or the inevitably annihilating experience of being run off the road and crashing it. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t like being passed,&amp;quot; he worries, but of course he passes them anyway on the way to work, hitting 100 miles per hour on the street and 120 miles per hour at the office park and popping the occasional celebratory wheelie in nothing but the white shirt, the short pants, and the mitered black helmet that makes him look like some kind of postmodern grenadier, sporting technological plumage. And then, when he gets to work, three miles from his house, he gets to ride something that goes even faster. He&amp;#039;s one of those guys with a coveted brain, so he&amp;#039;s one of those guys with a lot of gigs. He&amp;#039;s cofounder of a nonprofit organization called Sage Bionetworks, which is dedicated to facilitating biological research through an open-source sharing of data. He&amp;#039;s been trying to start his own institute \u2014 the catchily titled Institute for Multi Scale Biology \u2014 at the University of California, San Francisco, though he&amp;#039;s constantly getting wooed, and it seems inevitable that he&amp;#039;ll wind up with a big academic appointment somewhere, along with what&amp;#039;s known as &amp;quot;massive institutional support&amp;quot; \u2014 i.e., a lot of money. There&amp;#039;s a lot of money in biology, and Schadt, like a lot of other brilliant minds for hire, spends a lot of his time chasing it, making his pitch to the venture capitalists in and around the Bay Area or else going up to Seattle and making his pitch to the Gates Foundation and to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. &amp;quot;I think I must amuse Paul,&amp;quot; Schadt says. &amp;quot;He keeps on inviting me up there, and he never gives me any money.&amp;quot; He does, however, have a regular job, with somewhat regular hours, and that&amp;#039;s his job as chief scientific officer of a seven-year-old biotech company called Pacific Biosciences. It&amp;#039;s a pretty interesting job, because basically Pacific Biosciences hired him the way a big-time Nascar team hires a driver \u2014 that is, because it has this miraculous machine, and it wants someone to drive it really, really fast. Schadt had just left Merck and could have gone almost anywhere he wanted \u2014 Yale wanted him to start a systems-biology department, and Genentech wanted him as its head of genetic research, a story that harkens once again to the constants of smarts and salesmanship: &amp;quot;When I was interviewing for that job, the head of the company&amp;#039;s research department said, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re either completely full of shit or the smartest person on earth. We&amp;#039;re not smart enough to know. But we&amp;#039;re willing to bet that you&amp;#039;re the smartest person on earth.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; He wound up going to PacBio instead, even though it was essentially a start-up whose fortunes were and are tied to a machine called the RS, which stands for &amp;quot;real-time sequencer&amp;quot; but which is really an homage to &amp;quot;Rally Sport&amp;quot; and a nod to the fact that the people who run the company are really into California car culture. Schadt had heard of the RS when he was at Merck \u2014 he had heard that a scientist at Cornell named Stephen Turner had created a technology that could look at individual molecules of DNA in real time and was trying to take it into production. Schadt never thought he&amp;#039;d pull it off but realized that if he did ... well, the technology would be to some enterprising biologist what the telescope was to Galileo \u2014 a chance to corroborate what was a mathematical inference, a chance to see &amp;quot;changes in DNA causing changes in cellular networks causing changes in tissue networks going up to the whole organism.&amp;quot; And then, in 2008, PacBio gave him a call. Turner&amp;#039;s technology was now the RS, a $260 million triumph of engineering, design, and the kind of precautionary prophylaxis that&amp;#039;s usually implemented around Level 4 biohazards. Would Schadt like to take it for a spin? Oh, hell yes \u2014 it was a job offer that satisfied the gearhead in him, the daredevil, the biologist who thinks like an astronomer, and, not incidentally, the salesman. Indeed, in his job as PacBio&amp;#039;s top scientist, Schadt is a cross between Galileo, a paid thinker at someplace like the Santa Fe Institute, and a guy hawking ultra-high-end copiers. Yes, he&amp;#039;s already glimpsed some things with the PacBio RS \u2014 he&amp;#039;s looking to prove that instead of four bases making up the DNA molecule, there are actually so many modifications of the four that the real number could be more than twenty. (It&amp;#039;s a perfect Eric Schadt breakthrough, because not only would it be a &amp;quot;game changer,&amp;quot; it would also complicate the practice of biology beyond human capability.) But Schadt&amp;#039;s also on the road a lot and on the phone a lot, because PacBio hired him not only to figure out the best experimental applications for the RS but also to &amp;quot;work your collaborations like you&amp;#039;ve been doing&amp;quot; \u2014 because it was his collaborative nature, his connectivity, that was at the heart of his attempt to remake the scientific culture at Merck. And that&amp;#039;s where he&amp;#039;s happiest. He&amp;#039;s not the solitary scientist heroically thinking big thoughts. What he does at PacBio is his &amp;quot;vision of the perfect life&amp;quot; precisely because he&amp;#039;s hardly ever alone, precisely because after &amp;quot;thinking of the things I want to think about,&amp;quot; he gets to &amp;quot;travel around and talk them over with the most interesting people in the world.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s all about the network, you see. He&amp;#039;s helped identify it as the fundamental organizing principle of biological systems, and he sees very little difference between biological networks and social ones. When you look at biological networks comprised of thousands of genes, you&amp;#039;ll see that they are just like social ones, with a few &amp;quot;highly connected&amp;quot; genes showing up again and again as &amp;quot;hub nodes&amp;quot; and others acting as spokes and outliers. Well, Schadt&amp;#039;s ambition is to be a hub node. And PacBio allows him to realize his ambition because now not only is he Eric Fricking Schadt, but he&amp;#039;s also got the machine that nobody else in the world has \u2014 the telescope, the souped-up gene sequencer, the RS. People call him out of the blue. He picks up the phone. And if their interest sounds interesting enough, he says yes, even when \u2014 hell, especially when \u2014 he already has too many projects to handle. Bring it on, baby. So now he&amp;#039;s got collaborations going on with people at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Northwestern, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, the University of Washington, the University of Colorado, and the University of God Knows Where Else. He&amp;#039;s got collaborations going that are intended to target the relevant biological networks behind cancer, heart disease, aging, diabetes, and sleeping problems. He&amp;#039;s even collaborating with a scientist who&amp;#039;s trying to extract energy from bacteria. And back in November, he got a call from a team at Harvard that was trying to figure out the strain of cholera that was ripping the guts out of Haiti almost a year after the earthquake. They&amp;#039;d heard about him. Could he help? Moreover, could the PacBio RS help? So here&amp;#039;s what happened: They sent him the cholera strain from the cell culture, and he ran it through the RS. And four weeks after he received the samples, The New England Journal of Medicine published his paper with the results. A month, man. That&amp;#039;s instantaneous in the world of biology. That&amp;#039;s unprecedented. Turns out the strain of cholera originated in South Asia, and that information now makes a mass-vaccination plan feasible. But this is also part of Schadt&amp;#039;s vision \u2014 part of his pitch, part of what he&amp;#039;s selling. He&amp;#039;s worked at two big drug companies, Roche and Merck, and he knows what they&amp;#039;re good at and knows what they&amp;#039;re bad at. What they&amp;#039;re good at: making drugs. What they&amp;#039;re bad at: sharing. Unfortunately, what they&amp;#039;re bad at sharing is the information that would help them make better drugs. But Eric Schadt is the strange rebel who happens to play well with others. He&amp;#039;s the strange outlier who wants nothing more than to be a hub node. If anything, he overshares, and so what he wants to do is convince biologists to share for those who can&amp;#039;t. In all his collaborations, he says, &amp;quot;we don&amp;#039;t have as clear a path in getting drugs developed as in a pharmaceutical setting,&amp;quot; so what he and his collaborators are doing is &amp;quot;publishing papers so that anyone can pursue them for whatever reason&amp;quot; \u2014 i.e., so that drug companies can use the ideas in them to make better drugs. And this is the idea that really gets Schadt going. Eric Schadt&amp;#039;s the biggest thinker in biology, but meeting him sometimes feels like meeting Einstein and finding out that what he really liked about physics was the parties, like meeting Niels Bohr and having to look at his autograph collection. But that&amp;#039;s why this is Schadt&amp;#039;s moment: because he is out to erase the distinctions between intellectual force, technological force, and social force. Because as the Age of Information inexorably morphs into the Age of Information Overload, he&amp;#039;s figured out that social force is the key to science&amp;#039;s survival. And because when you ask him his grandest aim, his most cherished ambition, what he really wants to be, he answers, without hesitation, is a &amp;quot;master of information.&amp;quot; He never mentions the word science at all.  He wasn&amp;#039;t supposed to be a scientist, anyway. Literally. It was, like, forbidden. It was ungodly. He grew up in Stevensville, Michigan, a town of a thousand people one mile square. His family was hardcore evangelical. His stepfather was a hard man, a believer, and a beautician, in roughly that order. Was Eric Schadt a believer? &amp;quot;Of course I was. I had no choice.&amp;quot; Education was suspect \u2014 &amp;quot;I had no education to speak of.&amp;quot; And so although he went to high school, what he calls the &amp;quot;greatest compliment I ever received&amp;quot; came when a teacher pronounced him &amp;quot;untamable,&amp;quot; and as soon as he graduated, he was gone. He joined the Air Force, only to realize that instead of escaping the social and intellectual poverty of his background, he had planted himself &amp;quot;on the lowest rung of an organization that people in society already regarded as the lowest rung.&amp;quot; His answer: step one, &amp;quot;I became profoundly depressed.&amp;quot; Step two: He did the hardest thing he could think of doing, which was joining Special Operations. Parachute rescue. But he blew out his shoulder rappelling down a cliff, so he washed out. The Air Force looked to salvage its investment by giving him a battery of aptitude tests. When the results came back, he was asked if math had come easily to him in high school.  &amp;quot;Yeah, I guess so,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Well, look at your scores,&amp;quot; the Air Force said, and sent him to Cal Poly on a military scholarship. He studied computer science and applied math at Cal Poly, and it was like taking a drug. Education itself blew a mind hungry for expansion. It wasn&amp;#039;t just math. It was ... enlightenment. He came home, started talking about logic and philosophy, started posing &amp;quot;thought experiments&amp;quot; to his brothers and sisters. His stepfather kicked him out of the house. What he said, in Eric&amp;#039;s recollection: &amp;quot;You are of the devil. Leave and never come back.&amp;quot; Eric&amp;#039;s answer, of course, was to do the hardest thing he could think of doing, even after his mother called a year and a half later and invited him back into the fold. He went to UC Davis to get a doctorate in pure math. Pure math: a purely conceptual exercise that takes place in purely abstract space. That&amp;#039;s why they call it pure. But he kept learning real-world things from it. The first was how to sell something intellectually ambitious, even impossible: &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t understand, but if you can make them think you understand, your story wins.&amp;quot; The second was what he wanted to do with his life. He was still a Christian in orientation, if not in practice, and pure math, after a while, started feeling, well, &amp;quot;a little empty,&amp;quot; even ungodly. It wasn&amp;#039;t going to help anyone. So he passed his Ph.D. candidacy tests but never wrote his dissertation and instead enrolled in UCLA&amp;#039;s biomathematics Ph.D. program. He had the math for it, certainly, but since he hadn&amp;#039;t taken a biology course since high school, he had to learn Ph.D.-level biology &amp;quot;from scratch.&amp;quot; To catch up, he began reading through the basic textbooks in genetics and molecular biology on his own. Sounds hard. It wasn&amp;#039;t. Pure math was hard. Biology? &amp;quot;It was so easy, it was like a vacation. After pure math it was so refreshing and conceptually simple that my mind just locked onto it.&amp;quot;  Indeed, biology was so simple that he began to suspect that what was in the textbooks was simplified, even simplistic. He began to suspect there was something wrong with it, molecular biology in particular. As a former creationist, he immediately saw the insufficiency of a biology of broken pieces, and as a man of broken faith he wondered whether he could put it back together again. There&amp;#039;s a famous book, written by Thomas S. Kuhn and published in 1962, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Well, maybe it&amp;#039;s not so famous \u2014 but it&amp;#039;s hugely influential. It introduced the term &amp;quot;paradigm shift&amp;quot; into the language. A promiscuous term, as it turns out, used to describe everything from the emergence of smartphones to the omnipresence of the spread offense in college football. But in Kuhn&amp;#039;s book it describes something specific to science. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is not a peaceful process, characterized by the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Rather, it&amp;#039;s a nearly political one, characterized by acts of intellectual violence. A paradigm is like a king \u2014 it&amp;#039;s the body of knowledge and practice that coheres around a theory or a discovery, and in periods of stability everybody serves it by practicing what Kuhn calls &amp;quot;normal science.&amp;quot; Eventually, though, it becomes insufficient to its own ends and enters a period of crisis, during which it comes under attack by those practicing &amp;quot;extraordinary science.&amp;quot; At last, the king is overthrown, and that&amp;#039;s a paradigm shift. Has Schadt read Kuhn&amp;#039;s book? &amp;quot;I remember the exact month, almost the exact day I started reading that. It was when I first started graduate school in 1993.&amp;quot; And of course, he knew what kind of science he wanted to practice even before he knew what king he wanted to kill. A paradigm shift requires not only scientists practicing extraordinary science; it requires &amp;quot;attackers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;persuaders&amp;quot; willing to declaim the end of the old order and announce the dawn of the new. Schadt has turned out to be both. He&amp;#039;s very aware that biology is in the middle of a paradigm shift and very aware of his role in both the murder of molecular biology \u2014 the king is dead! \u2014 and the establishment of its successor. He&amp;#039;s even produced a documentary film entitled The New Biology, which heralds the arrival of a biology that&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;more like physics&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;more quantitative in nature&amp;quot; than biology has ever been. Not incidentally, it&amp;#039;s also a whole lot harder. He was doing New Biology even before he got his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1999. Big Pharma, in the form of Roche, had recruited him. He was thirty-three years old, just another brilliant nobody, but he started improving the algorithms on the &amp;quot;gene chips&amp;quot; Roche used for gene detection and sharing them publicly. That gave him a name; it also got him investigated by the U. S. Attorney&amp;#039;s office under suspicion of stealing trade secrets, because nobody could believe that he was picking the lock on proprietary algorithms without resorting to illegal means. He was cleared when investigators found out that, well, as a matter of fact, he could. Still, it was the start of his career, and he&amp;#039;d already seen &amp;quot;the amount of energy devoted to keeping you from breaking out of accepted paradigms. It was an extraordinary amount of energy. But the cool thing about the human spirit is its ability to push and persist if it thinks it&amp;#039;s on the right path. And the path I was on was the right path from which to change biology.&amp;quot; Yes, that&amp;#039;s right: The guy who wants to change biology now wanted to change biology even then, and eventually his ambition brought him to the attention of Stephen Friend and Leland Hartwell of Rosetta Inpharmatics. They were molecular biologists. To be more precise, they had made history as molecular biologists, Friend becoming the first scientist to clone a human gene associated with inherited tumors and Hartwell winning the damned Nobel Prize. That&amp;#039;s all. But they&amp;#039;d thought deeply about  molecular biology and had started Rosetta in part to address its inherent limitations, in particular its failure to deliver drugs to the marketplace. They were looking for the future. And so when Stephen Friend met Eric Schadt, he saw a scientist with &amp;quot;almost Mozart-like qualities \u2014 insights that are not always logical, but they&amp;#039;re correct. You talked to Eric and you said to yourself, Oh, my God, I can see what&amp;#039;s going to come.&amp;quot; Schadt went to Rosetta, and then, when Merck bought Rosetta, he went with Friend and a team of fifty nascent New Biologists to Merck. At the time, Merck was a molecular-biology company. It was using the basic techniques of molecular biology to figure what proteins to target and what drugs to develop. The main technique is called a &amp;quot;knockout study.&amp;quot; A scientist interested in the function of a specific gene &amp;quot;knocks out&amp;quot; the gene in mice bred for the purpose, to see what happens. Schadt and Friend thought the strategy was hopeless. Not only are there twenty-three thousand genes to be knocked out one gene at a time, there are also catastrophic side effects when the drug you develop to hit a single protein encoded by a single gene instead hits a network of genes and proteins all working together in mysterious and invisible concert.  The idea of networks was not original to Schadt. What was original to Schadt, however, was a method for finding them and proving their existence. How could he find something that was not only invisible but indescribably vast, involving thousands of genes and thousands of proteins? Well, the sky is vast, and astronomers can&amp;#039;t see the planets orbiting distant stars, either. But they prove their existence by measuring the changes in starlight and subjecting the data to statistical analysis. They never see the new planets \u2014 the whole new solar systems \u2014 they&amp;#039;re exploring. They just know they&amp;#039;re out there, in the numberless flickerings of the stars.  And that&amp;#039;s how Schadt proved the existence of biological networks. He developed algorithms to mine Merck&amp;#039;s massive troves of biological data, and he began finding genetic networks through statistical correlations. Were the networks merely theoretical? To the contrary: They were &amp;quot;highly predictive&amp;quot; experimentally \u2014 that is, they could predict the success or failure of therapeutic interventions. And so in 2003, he started publishing the papers that, in the words of a Merck spokesman, &amp;quot;changed the way people looked at disease,&amp;quot; and at the same time became the foundations of the New Biology. What&amp;#039;s more, he and his team began using the networks they were finding to figure out which genes Merck should target, until they were responsible for &amp;quot;half the drugs&amp;quot; in Merck&amp;#039;s pipeline. What&amp;#039;s more, long before GlaxoSmithKline ran into problems with Avandia, Schadt predicted that a similar drug Merck was developing would fail for the same reasons \u2014 because it would lower the risk of diabetes but increase the risk for cardiovascular problems \u2014 and therefore proved that the New Biology could save pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. And then, of course, he and Friend tried to turn Merck into a New Biology company, by which they meant a company that would share its data with networks of outside scientists and that would develop drugs that targeted networks instead of single genes. The problem with that: Merck was still an old biology company. The drugs in its pipeline \u2014 including the drugs informed by Schadt&amp;#039;s networks \u2014 targeted single genes. And so when Schadt and Friend made their presentation, this was Merck&amp;#039;s response: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not an information company.&amp;quot; And when, in 2009, Schadt published a paper in Nature entitled &amp;quot;A Network View of Disease and Compound Screening&amp;quot; \u2014 a paper that implied that drugs targeting single genes were doomed to failure \u2014 &amp;quot;well, that was the paper that got me kicked out of Merck.&amp;quot;  He likes to do his supercomputing on planes now, because that&amp;#039;s the one place where he&amp;#039;s alone. He had access to a supercomputer at Merck, but he and Friend left Merck in 2009 after negotiating an agreement to take the New Biology component with them \u2014 including the millions of dollars&amp;#039; worth of data necessary to continue their work \u2014 and turn it into Sage Bionetworks. He still needs the capacity of a supercomputer, however, because the amount of data generated by the networks he&amp;#039;s exploring is inordinate, overwhelming. There&amp;#039;s terabytes of data, petabytes of data. Fortunately, he has the same access to supercomputers that every other American with an Internet connection and a credit card has. He waits till the plane climbs to a cruising altitude, waits for the pilot to allow electronic devices, and then uses the plane&amp;#039;s WiFi to get on Amazon. Amazon sells a lot of stuff \u2014 books, washing machines, whatever the hell you want. What it sells Schadt is super-computing on the cheap. You see, companies like Amazon have a lot of computing power available, and now it&amp;#039;s gotten in the business of selling some of that to guys like Schadt and whoever else might want it. A guy like Schadt doesn&amp;#039;t have to work for a company like Merck anymore, because he has as much computing power available to him on an airplane as a scientist at Merck does on the company&amp;#039;s multimillion-dollar supercomputer. More even. On cross-country flights he tells Amazon what data to crunch after takeoff, and for a few hundred bucks the job&amp;#039;s done by the time he lands. He likes to talk about this kind of stuff, because it&amp;#039;s one of the ways he makes his sale. A lot of people are afraid of the Age of Information. They think things are getting too big and too complicated, and going too fast. You think scientists are immune? You think biologists are immune? No, they&amp;#039;re especially anxious, because biology has turned out to be even more complex than they thought, indeed precisely as complex as the world in general. And so what Schadt has done is not only give biologists the tools to deal with the problem of increasing complexity; he&amp;#039;s also sold complexity and has gotten biologists to relax and embrace it, in the words of Stephen Friend. &amp;quot;And it&amp;#039;s a good thing, because the complexity is just going to get worse. But Eric gets you to understand that it&amp;#039;s out of complexity that a pattern derives. That complexity is not the enemy but the vehicle of understanding, and embracing it is how you get there. You talk to him and he makes you think, Oh, this might turn out all right after all.&amp;quot; Schadt has sold the New Biology by making biologists feel that if they change biology, they can change the world. But he also makes it clear that as the world changes, it will change biology, whether biologists like it or not \u2014 whether we like it or not. For instance, he has this idea for what he calls a &amp;quot;disease weather map&amp;quot; that will inform people what kind of pathogens are on the handrails of the escalators, say, at the San Francisco Airport, or for that matter in the bathrooms. The idea would have been laughable just a few years ago, but Schadt is not only thinking about it \u2014 he&amp;#039;s doing it, with the PacBio RS. He&amp;#039;s sending out technicians, getting samples, and sequencing them more or less instantly. This is an extension of Schadt&amp;#039;s vision to expand the network model of human disease into tracking the forces of infection in the population at large; the network is not just genes, it&amp;#039;s also germs. He&amp;#039;s able to do the same with sewage outflows, which has led him to a vision of monitoring the pathogens that pour out of individual households \u2014 a vision of helpful technicians knowing what&amp;#039;s coming out of your toilets, and calling you if they think you need to eat more yogurt. Does anybody want a world of pathogen surveillance and transparent effluvia? Well, DARPA does, Schadt says \u2014 they&amp;#039;re very interested. And he&amp;#039;s not overly concerned about everybody else. He&amp;#039;s a revolutionary, and what he knows about revolutions \u2014 scientific and otherwise \u2014 is that &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s best to be one of the drivers of the revolution, and then it will work itself out.&amp;quot; What he knows about revolutions is that &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s always this outcry, but the revolution marches on. And I would rather be part of the revolution than on the outside figuring out what it all means.&amp;quot; And that&amp;#039;s what Eric Schadt&amp;#039;s really all about \u2014 why he wants to be a &amp;quot;master of information&amp;quot; instead of simply a scientist. The New Biology is the New World, and he wants to be part of both. He wants to be one of the people who help other people figure out that information overload is not the enemy, if you know how to read it (and have supercomputer access). He wants to be part of what he calls &amp;quot;a revolution in human intelligence.&amp;quot; He wants to make the sale, even if what he&amp;#039;s selling is what so many fear. The world is getting too big? Make it bigger. The world is getting too fast? Make it faster. The world is getting complex to the point of impossibility? Bring it on, baby. Bring it on. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a9639/eric-schadt-0411/>