Successfully mapping the human genome is akin to finding biology's holy grail. But scientists like Stanford biochemist Ron Davis say the really hard part -- figuring out what the tens of thousands of individual genes do -- is still to come. "My suspicions are that we're going to find out all sorts of new things about what DNA is used for," says Davis, director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center.
Davis, David Cox, David Botstein and Richard Myers are among the Stanford researchers working on the U.S. Human Genome Project, helping to map the 3 billion chemical bits that make up the human genetic code. In the old days -- prior to the June 26 White House announcement that scientists had completed a rough outline of the genome -- researchers had to rely on educated hunches. "The information that is in the genome was unknown to us, so we had to guess and we had to perform our experimentations in a certain way," Davis says. "It was kind of like trying to fix a car blindfolded."
But now that about 90 percent of the genome has been sequenced -- identified and placed in order -- scientists are hunkering down for the long haul. Whether they are developing new approaches to personalized medicine in the fledgling field of pharmagenomics or trying, as specialists of proteomics, to sort out the functions of proteins, they will need new tools.
For those tools, many will knock at the door of the Stanford Genome Technology Center. One of 17 labs collaborating in the U.S. Human Genome Project, the facility is developing new technologies to speed the sequencing and analysis of DNA. Davis oversees a multidisciplinary team of some 85 biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers and software designers who spend much of their time inventing nifty instruments -- like the plaque picker, a robotic amalgam of test tubes and needles that can pluck a viral infestation off a colony of bacteria.
Dreaming up new technologies calls for a kind of psychological sleight of hand. "What you try to do is think about what's needed, independent of the technology that exists," Davis says. "You look for projects that make you say, 'No way,' and then you go, 'Well, okay, how could we do it?'"
One of the center's newest projects is developing an automated, miniaturized tool that could prospect for DNA on the surface of Mars. "NASA's concept is to look for some organism or microbe they can grow on a plate," Davis says. "Our concept is to look for DNA."
Yes way.
