During the Star Wars years of the 1980s, Tom Paterson worked at
a defense think tank creating elaborate mathematical models to
help military commanders quickly decide which weapons to deploy
to counter incoming missiles. Inputs from hundreds of sensors
had to be combined to generate a consummate picture of events
that would be unfolding in a matter of minutes, enabling the
fateful choice about when to launch. When the cold war ended,
Paterson, like many defense engineers, tried to find a way to
apply his skills elsewhere. He ultimately took on a task that
made shooting down missiles seem pedestrian. A challenge faced
by engineers in the Star Wars program--designing software to
pick out critical targets despite an overload of data--carried
over to simulations of how drugs work in the metabolic and
immune systems that drive the most complex machine we know. This
article was originally published with the title Reverse-
Engineering Clinical Biology.