At first glance, the luminous image rolling across a conference room wall at Affymetrix Inc. looks like mysterious transmissions from an alien race using an intricate language we don’t understand. But it’s a readout of an experiment on Earth, it soon becomes clear -- a graph of the thicket of coded messages sent out by the human genome and proof to the company’s founder of his technology’s power to uncover the secrets of biology. In 1989, Stephen Fodor led a scientific team that invented a new way to ask questions of the genetic code and receive quick answers. The team developed a gene chip that can rapidly detect the presence of a gene or slice of genetic code in a sample of blood or tissue. Such data can reveal the genetic causes of disease, plumb the degree of our kinship with animals and tell us how different we are from distant populations. In this building in Santa Clara, Affymetrix was born as an independent company in 1992. Soon it was selling GeneChip arrays that could test for genetic variations that were being discovered through the Human Genome Project and other research. As that knowledge exploded, Affymetrix eventually created chips that span the entire human genome. Now, one of its most powerful chips is being used to explore remaining frontiers, such as the so-called dark regions of the human genome being scanned on the conference room wall.
