Photo: Felix Aburto
It was the first Saturday of Spring 2003, and Joe DeRisi and his postdoc David Wang were staked out at either end of the University of California, San Francisco's Genentech Hall waiting for the FedEx truck. DeRisi, had recently moved his lab to the university's new Mission Bay campus. With the lot still surrounded by chain link fencing and the loading dock closed for the weekend, DeRisi and Wang feared that the FedEx driver might get discouraged and depart without delivering their package: samples of genetic material extracted from the causative agent of SARS.
At the time, SARS was killing patients and healthcare workers in Southeast Asia. Diagnostic tests had until that point failed to identify the culprit. DeRisi thought he could help. Over the previous year, DeRisi, Wang, HHMI investigator Don Ganem, and their UCSF colleagues had engineered a microarray that sported sequences from all known ...
