Since their rise to fame in the mid 1990s, microarrays have been both lauded and criticized. Enthusiasm about this technology, which many researchers say has forever fundamentally changed biology, is tempered by the recognition that the microarray, like any tool or technology, has its limits. Results are often hard to reproduce and interpret, and the data-driven approach encouraged by the technology can make microarray studies little more than what critics call "fishing expeditions."
Microarrays simultaneously can measure expression for hundreds, even thousands of genes, and more recently, proteins or RNA. They have been used already in countless applications, including evolutionary quandaries on species relatedness, microbe identification, tumor classification, and immune system response. "They've opened up possibilities of new perspectives, new views," says Gregory C. Gibson, associate professor of genetics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh.
Frank Sistare, head of the Food and Drug Administration's division of applied pharmacology research, compares microarrays ...
