Microarray Milestones
The late 1980s were heady days for molecular biologists. PCR was only a few years old. The automated DNA sequencer had just been invented. The Human Genome Project was being debated in Congress. Against such a backdrop, two events on either side of the Atlantic Ocean hardly registered at all.
At Oxford University Edwin Southern, of Southern blot fame, developed a way to use inkjet printing – using four bases rather than four colors – to build oligonucleotide sequences on glass slides like Legos on a solid surface, one atop another. At the same time a young biochemist named Stephen Fodor at a little-known Palo Alto, Calif.-based company called Affymax, began tinkering with using photolithography – a technique used to etch the tiny features of semiconductor chips – to do the same thing.
Aware that they had something powerful by the tail, Southern and Fodor toiled in their ...
