Why did you specialise in microfabricating devices for analysing biological molecules?
When I went to LSU in 1992 my intention was to do single molecule detection and ultrasensitive biological fluorescence measurements, especially related to genome analysis (I had done similar work at Los Alamos National Laboratory). But when I arrived, a new facility was opened: the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices. It’s a synchrotron source where they do X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray lithography, but they also built a clean room to do micro- and nanofabrication. In 1993, when the first microchip electrophoresis paper by Andreas Manz and Jed Harrison appeared in Science, we merged the ideas in that paper with the resources at LSU to forge new ideas in developing microfluidic systems made from polymers. It was a little bit of luck that the resources became available just when the original paper came out. What projects are you working on at the moment? We’ve really spanned out into some intriguing areas. Our original concept was to do genome analysis and we’re still doing th
