Gene Readers

摘要

I slip on a gauze hair cap, white coat, and blue plastic booties and shuffle into one of the cleanest rooms in the world. In one of several plastic-walled pods, a robot designed to etch circuits in silicon is pressing a glass wafer the size of a compact disc case up to a black-flecked screen. Oddly, there's no silicon in sight. Instead, light filtered through the screen etches a layout onto glass patches. The layout is for an intricate pattern of thousands of microscopic elements built, by another robot, from the molecules of life. These are "DNA chips" that can speed-read any human's genetic blueprint.