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A diagrammatic close-up of the lab-on-a-chip featured on page one of this story. Cells and buffers are moved in and out of a processing unit through fine tubing connected by stainless steel pins. Valves, represented by small rectangles, are marked with an x when closed.
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Image by Jong Wook Hong and Stephen Quake. Reprinted with permission from Nature Biotechnology, 2004, 22 (4): 435-439. © 2004 Nature Publishing Group.
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Most recently, Quake has been working on "interrogating" single cells for genetic data. Several years ago, he read in a journal article by Stanford microbiologist David Relman that many disease-causing pathogens remain unknown because more than 99 percent of microbes cannot be grown in lab cultures. Microbial ecosystems are complex little societies of so many interacting bugs that it is technically challenging to pick out and learn about any one player.
Quake contacted Relman and joined him in studying the microbial jungle of the human mouth. Quake's group designed a device with nine processing units to analyze bacteria that thrive within tooth plaque. By routing the sample through a series of chambers, each unit could isolate an individual bug, lyse it open, and make hundreds of thousands of copies of its genome. With further work off-chip, the team successfully sequenced most of the genome of one microbe called TM7—the first of its bacterial class for which researchers have any genetic information. They published the results in July in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
At Stanford, Quake has set up a foundry with a clean room for producing microfluidics chips—2,680 of them last year—for academic researchers. At age 38, he holds more than 30 U.S. patents and is cofounder of two companies that have been developed around his technology, Fluidigm and Helicos BioSciences.
Quake has a big goal for his small devices: he envisions lab-on-a-chip technology accelerating biology research in the same way the silicon computer chip revolutionized mathematical computation. 
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