If Leroy Hood is right - and, with his track record, you'd be unwise to bet against him - our current brand of medicine will change so radically in the next 10 to 15 years that all health care industries, even medical schools, will need to restructure almost every aspect of their operations. Not only will routine visits to your doctor resemble what Hood calls "Star Trek Medicine," but an array of today's most successful businesses will face a life-or-bankruptcy choice: Adapt to the needs and opportunities of the coming revolution, or blithely bet that their 20th-century ways will somehow let them ignore 21st-century developments in science, technology and diagnostics that will seem almost magical by today's treatment standards.

Hood's vision is "P4 Medicine," his term for a pioneering health care model that is Preventive, Personalized, Predictive and Participatory. Here's how this entrepreneurial scientist, who was personally lured to the Northwest by Bill Gates, and whom Newsweek recently named one of America's "Ten Hottest Nerds," envisions your medical checkup in 2018:

Instead of driving to your doctor's office, getting poked and prodded, answering a battery of questions and stopping by the lab afterward for a handful of blood tests or an X-ray, you'll be lounging on your living room couch. During the next commercial, you'll slide one finger into a device about the size of a cell phone. It will sample a drop of  your blood, catalogue the 2,000 to 3,000 proteins suspended there, and then wirelessly transmit this protein "fingerprint" to a biotech laboratory, where sophisticated computer programs will analyze data about all of your body's organs and systems and assess their health. Both you and your physician will receive a comprehensive report via e-mail. You'll do this every six months or so.

"We'll be able to read those protein fingerprints and say, 'Your liver, your heart, your brain are just fine. But your kidney has a problem,'" Hood says. "I would say we would begin to see these instruments, in their early stages, in 10 years."

And this new relationship with your physician is just the beginning of the metamorphosis. "If you think about the consequences of this new medicine, I'd argue that it would change, in a very fundamental way, the business plan of every single sector of the health care industry: drug companies, insurance companies, HMOs, payers, medical instrumentation, IT health care and the like," Hood insists. "Over the next 10 years, the interesting question is: As this revolution manifests itself, how are these companies going to respond to these new kinds of opportunities? Will they be able to overcome their lumbering bureaucracies and their outmoded habits and succeed at a different game? Or will new, more agile companies seize these markets?"

If Leroy Hood were just another ivory tower academic, it might be safe to adopt a wait-and-see attitude about his sweeping, portentous predictions. But Hood, who helped create the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle in 2000, invented the groundbreaking automated genome sequencer, a machine that made it possible to more efficiently map the unique genetic makeup of any person in the world. He helped start 14 biotechnology companies, including Amgen, now the world's largest, as well as Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin and Rosetta. He is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and is one of only seven people (out of 6,000 living scientists) elected to membership in all three national academies - the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.