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Article: Shrinking "laboratory" onto a computer chip.(miniature laboratories on computer chip)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- June 1, 1998
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Society for the Advancement of Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Laboratory technicians soon may be trading their lab coats for laptop computers. Fred Regnier, professor of chemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., has developed a way to take specialized instruments from the chemistry lab, shrink them 1,000 to 1,000,000 times, and put them on a computer chip. This will allow scientists to pack dozens or hundreds of "laboratories"--each fully capable of carrying out complex chemical analyses--on a single silicon chip, reducing the cost and boosting the efficiency of many chemical and medical analyses.
The miniature laboratories can be used to separate mixtures into pure chemical components. Such separations, called ...