 Parapress Presents, Hood, Trailblazer of the Genomics Age by Luke Timmerman, narrated by Exysands and Luke Timmerman. Forward. Written by David Baltimore, President Emeritus, Robert Andrews Millican Professor of Biology, California Institute of Technology. Lee Hood is a legend. He has produced a raft of scientific accomplishments, and that is only part of the story. He has a perspective that gives each of his talks a distinctive quality. He is always looking ahead. Other visiting speakers may come to a university to display what they have accomplished. For Lee, that is old news. He comes to tell his audiences what he sees happening in the future. He regales us with how he is helping to create that future, giving hints of what is to come. He has been doing this for decades, and I have heard various renditions of his futurism at scientific meetings, at university seminars, and in living rooms in Montana, where we both have gone together to enjoy outdoor activities. The remarkable thing about Lee's predictions is how often they come to pass. But even if his predictions are not fulfilled, and usually he promises more than is delivered, his talks have one remarkable consequence. The young people who come are transfixed. They realize that the enterprise they are preparing themselves for is a huge one with wide ramifications. They realize that the reality of the small advances that they struggle to make daily has another dimension. It is part of a greater struggle to understand living organisms, to deal with the imperfections of inheritance, and to counter disease. They see only someone who has encompassed this larger vision and is consumed by making it the reality. Lee studied and worked at Caltech, the university where I have been for the last twenty years. He had left years before I arrived, but his outsized personality and his drive left a huge legacy at Caltech. People remembered his many ideas, his large and ever-increasing laboratory, his leadership and his friendship. He had started at Caltech as an undergraduate, went off to medical school at Johns Hopkins, came back as a graduate student, went off to NIH for a short stint, and then returned to Caltech as a faculty member for more than twenty years. His impact on immunology was enormous. For his graduate work, he filled out the thoughts of his mentor Bill Dreyer, and they presented strong evidence that antibody genes had both variable and constant regions joined into one molecule. How that might happen was a mystery solved by Susumu Tonogawa, who showed that joining DNA was a key mode of diversification for antibodies. In the mid-1970s, when Tonogawa's work was published, and when recombinant DNA methods were developed, I was seduced to become an immunologist. That brought me in contact with Lee because we were both trying to understand the mechanisms that generated antibody diversity. We were really trying to work out the molecular biology of a process that had much earlier been recognized by Sir Frank McFarlane Burnett and Joshua Leed.