Dr. Uwe Scherf, a very experienced molecular biologist in Dr. Weinstein's group, answered numerous questions from me on DNA microarrays. Uwe, I wish you good luck with your new position at Gene Logic!
Prof. Martin L. Perl, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics, found www.gene-chips.com "very useful" and suggested it be brought to the attention of Science readers in NetWatch. Thank you for your suggestion, Dr. Perl. I hope that more people will benefit from this little piece of my work.
Thanks to Mr. Roger Perkins and Dr. Weida Tong, my supervisors with R.O.W. Sciences at the FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research, for their interests and encouragement during the development of www.gene-chips.com. I also benefited from numerous discussions with many NCTR scientists, particularly, Charles Wang, M.D., Ph.D., who has been spearheading the NCTR efforts on DNA microarray applications.
Dr. Weiming Hu of American Cyanamid Company/AHP helped me in understanding the biological details of the microarray technology.
Many visitors sent me comments, corrections, and suggestions. I greatly appreciate your input and look forward to hearing from you again. Although efforts have been made to reply to each inquiry, I cannot guarantee that I'll be able to do the same because of the increasing number of inquiries I receive.
Budget for registering the www.gene-chips.com domain name and for hosting this site was kindly approved by my beautiful and supportive wife, Feng Qian, who is enjoying her career transition from chemistry to computer science and has given me a lot of good suggestions and help. Thank you, Feng!
Investment of my weekend time in maintaining this site has been reluctantly approved by my lovely daughters, Jessica (7) and Melissa (1). They sacrificed a lot of opportunities for having their daddy to play with them together on the playground.
Jessica: I hope that some day you'll enjoy visiting www.gene-chips.com as much as you enjoy www.pokemon.com and www.disney.com. Daddy knows that there is a long way to go to reach that goal. :)-
Melissa: I knew how upset you were when daddy was working on www.gene-chips.com and you were not allowed to play with daddy's Sony notebook computer. However, next time, please don't revenge by throwing the mouse, or, at least, the notebook itself, on the floor. Otherwise, daddy will have to cut the budget for your toys so that I can repair/replace the notebook. I hope that you'll learn to enjoy playing with mommy's DELL desktop. :)-
I consider myself a fan of the exciting technology of DNA chips and DNA microarrays.
I started the Gene-Chips page in July, 1998, right before I was going to attend the FDA's workshop on DNA Microarray: Current Technology and Future Applications, July 14-15, 1998 at the NIH campus (http://first.fda.gov/scisem/microarr.htm; you may not be able to access it because it is behind the FDA firewall, I believe). My initial intention was just to keep a record for myself of the pages I found interesting on this exciting technology, along with my comments. I privately discussed my page with a few FDA and NIH researchers during the workshop and got very encouraging responses from them. It was at that time I decided that I should make my page helpful and accessible to more people interested in the DNA chip technology. After the FDA workshop I gave a talk on DNA microarray at the FDA's National Center for Toxicological Research where I had been working for some time.
However, my exposure to this technology started more than
two years ago when the National Cancer Institute (NCI) initiated the Cancer
Genome Anatomy Project (CGAP) and I was working in Dr. John Weinstein's
group at the NCI. As a computational chemist, I was working on a
project to extend the analytical tools that were used for mining the large
databases (including anticancer activity, molecular structure, and biological
target information) generated from the NCI anticancer drug screening program
(cf. Weinstein JN et al., Science, 1997, 275:343-349). The Weinstein
group collaborated with Dr. Patrick Brown's group at Stanford to characterize
the genomic fingerprints of the 60 human cancer cell lines used in the
NCI screening program. Although I was not involved in the experiments,
I got very interested in the microarray technology and did a lot of reading
and surfing.