ast December, in the face of one of the worst winter storms in decades, the Institute for Systems Biology declared a snow day. Most researchers stayed home, and a calm stillness transcended the Institute's three-story home overlooking Seattle's snow-crested Lake Union. Rows of stacked PCR machines sat unused, and the room full of mass spectrometry machines was silent—hardly the poster-image of systems biology.
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Yet in a small, darkened room, behind a flimsy, light-blocking curtain, action was lurking: Red LED's flashed, solenoid valves shuttered, and a rhythmic pulsing overpowered the slight hum of the machinery. Click, click, click. Click, click, click.
That morning, Lee Pang, a bioengineering postdoc in Nitin Baliga's lab, failed to dig his car out of the snow. But from the comfort of his own home, he was still operating ...
