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.

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