Back pocket barcoder?

Back pocket barcoder? By Bob Grant Related Articles Cataloging Life The Barcoding Factory Hiding in plain sight Slideshow: Barcoding the world The problem with plants It was 2003, and University of Guelph researcher Paul Hebert was taking heat from an audience of taxonomists and phylogeneticists at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory seminar for suggesting that they barcode Earth's inhabitants using the CO1 mitochondrial gene. University of Pennsy

Written byBob Grant

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By Bob Grant

Cataloging Life

The Barcoding Factory

Hiding in plain sight

Slideshow: Barcoding the world

The problem with plants

It was 2003, and University of Guelph researcher Paul Hebert was taking heat from an audience of taxonomists and phylogeneticists at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory seminar for suggesting that they barcode Earth's inhabitants using the CO1 mitochondrial gene. University of Pennsylvania ecologist Dan Janzen remembers standing up, pulling a plastic comb out of his back pocket, holding it aloft and saying, "What I want to see is what Paul is talking about, but in something that costs what this costs."

Janzen had a vision of a future where a portable, disposable barcoding device would be in the back pocket of every school child, customs agent, and third world farmer on Earth. This device, the white-haired, bushy-bearded Janzen explained, would accept a bird feather or insect wing, sequence the sample's ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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