Professor Peter Hunter and his team are on the brink of a technological revolution. Photo / Richard Robinson

Professor Peter Hunter and his team are on the brink of a technological revolution. Photo / Richard Robinson

Catherine Masters meets the latest recipient of the Rutherford Medal.

Gattaca was on the television the other night. That's the 1997 film about a future world where your DNA can be processed in seconds and your genetic makeup determines whether you are included in society or destined for the most menial of jobs.

In his Auckland University office with sweeping views to the museum and tennis courts on Stanley St, which he confesses he sometimes forgets to look at, Professor Peter Hunter says casually that the film was not farfetched at all.

This extremely clever scientist says such technological revolution is with us already, it's just damn expensive. The goal of being able to do complete DNA scans for people for $1000 is probably only five years away, he says. If that.

Hunter is one of those at the forefront of bringing amazing technological revolution within reach.

The Auckland Bioengineering Institute director, who has just been awarded this country's most prestigious science honour, the Rutherford Medal, is behind what is called the Physiome Project, an international project which aims to build computer models of all the organ systems of the human body.

The aim is a virtual human body built from the smallest components up, formed by mathematics and graphics.

The Rutherford Medal follows another honour for Hunter. In 2006 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, where is his name is listed alongside the likes of Sir Isaac Newton and Einstein.

Hunter is a self-confessed workaholic who says though he may have received the honour, science never happens in isolation. He patiently chunks advances in science down, explaining how breakthroughs in different areas converge and move science forward.

Think about the human genome project, he says. This began with the structure of DNA in the mid-1950s. American biologist James Watson and British physicist Francis Crick came up with the famous DNA helix which led to an extraordinary 50-year revolution in the field of molecular biology.

The human genome project was about the complete understanding of the DNA behind life, he says. It's the process of reductionism, of having a complex organism which is a combination of genetics and all sorts of other environmental processes which all go along with making the human body what it is.

Though reductionism - breaking the body into its tiniest bits - has been going on for years, little work had been attempted on putting it all back together again, "to take Humpty Dumpty who's broken into a million pieces and reassemble him into understanding how he works as an intact, integrated organism."