Trustee Jeffrey Lynford has a knack for pinpointing scientists and thinkers at the cutting edge of discovery. Since it was launched in 1998, the annual lecture series that bears his name has featured three Nobel laureates, two Turing Award winners, and a Fields medalist. On March 12, he added to that noteworthy roster when Eric Schadt, a computational biologist who heads the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mt. Sinai, addressed a large audience at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.
Schadt is known for taking a data-enabled, network-oriented view of human health, in stark contrast to the reductionist, single-gene approaches that currently dominate medical inquiry. He doesn’t mind, he told his listeners, being considered an iconoclast. “Orthodox thinking that stifles innovation isn’t unique to medicine,” he asserted, explaining that technology can be disruptive no matter what the field. “Think of Harry Warner, the studio head who wondered why anyone would ever want to hear an actor speak, or Thomas Watson of IBM, who thought that there would never be a world market for more than five computers.”