For Smith and other physical scientists, the grail of the government's Human Genome Project (HGP) is not the sequence and analysis of our 3 billion DNA bases, as it is for the biologists, but the technology that will actually do it. Armed with an array of analytical hardware such as mass spectrometers, scanning tunneling microscopes, and flow cytometers, these physicists and chemists are seeking new and improved systems that can read the order of the four nucleotide bases from the stretch of DNA.
While many of the ideas for new sequencing technologies have been around since the mid-1980s, the HGP in the last two years has spurred the pace of their development. It has also created a niche for collaborations among physical scientists and molecular biologists, says Jane Peterson, chief of research centers for the National Institutes of Health's HGP effort. Developing new sequencing technologies "takes interdisciplinary work," she says. ...
