Sara Latta | Sep 14, 1997 | 7 min read
The laboratory is shrinking. Scientists and engineers are borrowing miniaturization, integration, and parallel-processing techniques from the computer industry to develop laboratory devices and procedures that will fit on a wafer or microchip. A growing number of companies and investors are betting that the technology will revolutionize drug development, genomics, environmental monitoring, forensics, and clinical diagnostics, in much the same way the microprocessor transformed the computer indu