TABLE OF CONTENTS "Jim, you've got to let me go in there! Don't leave him in the hands of Twentieth Century medicine."
Dr. Leonard McCoy speaking to Captain James Kirk, in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 1986.
The "medical tricorder" in the famed Star Trek television series is a purely fictional device for the remote scanning of biological functions in living organisms. The device remains futuristic, but significant advances in biochemistry have made it possible to decipher the genetic code of living organisms. Today, dozens of companies are involved in biochemical analysis at the microscale, with a concentration of them involved in genomics, proteomics, and pharmacogenics. Their successes have already had a positive impact on the health of the population; examples include faster analysis of pathogens responsible for illness and of agricultural products as well as more rapid sequencing of the human genome. Systems expected in the near future will detect airborne pathogens responsible for illness (such as Legionnaire's disease or anthrax in a terrorist attack) with a portable unit, give on-demand genetic diagnostics for the selection of drug therapies, be able to test for food pathogens such as E. coli on site, and more rapidly test for bloodborne pathogens.
Conventional commercial instruments for biochemical and genetic analysis, such as those available from Applied Biosystems of Foster City, California, perform a broad range of analytical functions but are generally bulky. The concept of micro total analysis system ( ? TAS), which aims to...
