This TED Talk features network researcher Albert Laslo Barabasi, recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic

2019.

Today actually is a very special day for me, because it is my birthday.

And so thanks for all of you for joining the party.

But every time you throw a party, there's someone there to spoil it.

And I'm a physicist, and this time I brought another physicist along to do so.

His name is Albert Einstein, also Albert.

And he's the one who said that a person who has not made his great contribution to science by the age of 30 will never do so. Now, you don't

need to check Wikipedia that I'm beyond 30. So effectively what he's telling me and us,

that when it comes to my science, I'm a dead wood.

Well, luckily, I had my share of luck within my career.

Around age 28, I became very interested in networks. And a few years later,

we managed to kind of publish a few key papers that reported the discovery of scale-free networks

and really gave birth to a new discipline that we call network science today. And if you really care

about it, you can get a PhD now in network science in Budapest,

in Boston, and you can study it all over the world. A few years later, when I moved to Harvard

first as a sabbatical, I became interested in another type of networks. And that time, the networks

within ourselves, how the genes and the proteins

and the metabolites link to each other, and how they connect to disease. And that also, that

interest led to a major explosion within medicine, including the network medicine division at Harvard

that has more than 300 researchers who are using

this perspective to treat patients and develop new cures. And a few years ago, I thought that I would

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