Sequencing Milestones
As a graduate student at Stanford University in the early 1990s, Jonathan Eisen convinced a friend with access to one of the first automated DNA sequencers to run 10,000 base pairs for him. "Doing it myself, without an automated sequencer, would have taken at least a year, and it wouldn't have been particularly accurate," he recalls. Instead, Eisen got the entire sequence in just two weeks. "I never did manual sequencing again," says Eisen. "Even a simple sequence. There was no point."
The automated sequencer irrevocably altered Eisen's work, as it did for every single life scientist working today. Without it, researchers likely would still be working on the first draft of the human genome, and slowly spitting out sequences on yearly timetables that take just hours to complete today. Eisen is now an evolutionary biologist at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Md., an institute ...
