ISB News

Lee’s 75th Birthday and his Influence Network

Oct. 10, 2013 Today, ISB’s president and co-founder, Dr. Lee Hood, celebrates his 75th birthday. To honor this occasion we have invited individuals with a professional connection to Lee Hood to answer some questions in a survey we called “Lee Hood’s Influence Network.” In doing so, we were able to collect information on the myriad associations that Lee has formed over the decades of his illustrious career. The survey contained…

NIH Awards $45M to Alzheimer’s Research

The National Institutes of Health announced $45 million in grants to support several research groups that are focused on Alzheimer's prevention. ISB's Price Lab will be working with the University of Florida to use systems biology to identify new therapeutic targets in the innate immune system. The systems approach, which ISB pioneered, allows scientists to integrate and analyze disparate data (genome, gene expression, pathology) in order to find the molecular…

K-12 Science Education: MESA Math Scholars Visit ISB

Just as the Seattle tourist traffic picks up in the summer, the intern and visitor traffic at ISB spikes during July and August. It’s always inspiring to see the fresh faces of high school students in our halls. On Aug. 7, the MESA Math Scholars came to ISB to visit our labs and spend some time with a few of our scientists. MESA stands for Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement and…

ISB’s 2012 Annual Report is Now Online

ISB's annual report is now available. This year, we created a web site for the report. It highlights nine headlines from 2012 and also includes a stirring piece from our president, Dr. Lee Hood, on "Inventing the Future." You can explore the site at: annualreport.isbscience.net/2012.  

To Inspire Students, We Have to Inspire their Teachers

JUNE 24, 2013 — Dr. Lee Hood, ISB’s president, says that we have to “infect” kids with the excitement of science. The same can be said about their teachers. It may even be more crucial to inspire teachers, because they’re the ones who have the most impact on the greatest number of kids. At ISB, the transfer of knowledge to society is a part of our core. Supporting K-12 science…

ISB Recieves $1.8M Grant for Ocean Acidification Research

Congratulations to Dr. Mónica Orellana and Dr. Nitin Baliga on their new grant for $1.8 million from the National Science Foundation. The project title is “Ocean Acidification: A Systems Biology Approach to Characterize Diatom Response to Ocean Acidification and Climate Change.” Abstract from the proposal: Diatoms account for approximately 40 percent of primary production in the world’s oceans and are the most productive marine phytoplankton group. They form the basis…

Luxembourg-ISB Partnership: ‘An Unqualified Success’

By Hsiao-Ching Chou LUXEMBOURG JOURNAL, June 12, 2013 – At the 17th-century Neumünster Abbey, the cultural heart of Luxembourg City, a small group of some of the world’s most cutting-edge scientists gathered on June 10-11, 2013, for a symposium to discuss the future of medicine and healthcare. The consensus was clear: Achieving the greatest advances requires “no-box” thinking, cross-disciplinary teamwork and, as ISB president, Dr. Lee Hood, likes to say,…

Microsoft’s Craig Mundie Joins ISB Board

ISB announced three new board of directors members this morning. The full press release is here. Douglas Howe: Howe is the president and founder of Touchstone Corporation, a Seattle-based commercial real estate company that focuses on the development of urban infill projects and leads the industry in designing and constructing high-performance, sustainable green buildings. More info Craig Mundie: Mundie is the senior advisor to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp….

K-12 Education: Next Generation Science Standards

By Dana Riley Black, ISB Director for Center for Inquiry Science April 11, 2013 — Earlier this week the new national Next Generation Science Standards were released. (Here’s a New York Times report regarding the release.) While states are not required to adopt these new standards, 26 states, including Washington State, are seriously considering adoption.  Similar to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts, the Next…

ISB Takes 1st Place in YarcData Contest

Dr. Brady Bernard, Andrea Eakin, and Dr. Ilya Shmulevich, of The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), were awarded first prize and will split $70,000 for their winning entry researching more than 25 different types of cancers and thousands of patients to gain insight into the biological networks that are disrupted or altered within a given cancer type and to identify potentially potent approved drugs that could be repurposed for the…

ISB in Antarctica: Snow Blinks and Water Skies

By Allison Lee My eyes behold a feast of pleasant views. Today I learned the difference between “snow blink” and “water sky.” When it is overcast, some parts of the sky look black and stormy. In Seattle, we would say, “Looks like a storm is a brewing.” Here in Antarctica, they call that “water sky.” That is sky that is reflecting the blackness of the sea. Sailors know that open…

President Obama Presents National Medal of Science to Dr. Lee Hood

ISB NEWS We have been celebrating Dr. Lee Hood’s National Medal of Science, which he received during a White House ceremony on Feb. 1. While the medal honors Lee’s career as a visionary scientist, we would like to thank all the past and current collaborators who have contributed to the success of not only Lee but of ISB, too. ISB has always valued collaboration across disciplines as well as between…

Combing the Hairball

Traditional node-link diagram of a network of yeast protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions with over 3,000 nodes and 6,800 links. Data from: von Mering et. al. Nature, 417, 399-403, May 2002; Lee et. al. Science, 298: 799-804 (2002) The node-link diagram above is a “hairball” of biological network data. Because it’s such a large network, it’s hard to scan for patterns or interesting interactions worth further investigation. But Bill Longabaugh, a…

It Takes A System To Know A System

Figure depicting cross-disciplinary collaborations among lab groups and usage of technologies housed in ISB’s core facilities. In August, ISB learned that our National Center for Systems Biology was renewed for $13.7 million over the next five years. This is no small feat given that only two National Centers were funded in this round and that there’s fierce competition for diminishing government grants. Here’s how your tax dollars are being put…

SXSW Healthcare Track Raises Question About Tech Tipping Point

This morning, one of our researchers who's working parttime to develop pilot projects related to personalized medicine for the P4 Medicine Institute (P4MI) shared an update. Among the challenges of launching a pilot project is getting individuals and, especially, families to collect biometric data over time. This involves a willingness from participants not only to record all this data but share it in the cloud, which raises questions about security…