Origins of the Microarray Course

[David Stewart]

So one of the fun courses we started was in 1999. We started the microarray course. This grew out of a conversation between Jim Watson, Pat Brown and myself. So Jim had given a key note at this conference and Pat Brown had been talking about this new technology that we had, DNA microarrays, so up to certain points Pat Brown said “ahhh you could come to my lab to learn how to build robots and print microarrays” and Jim Watson said “why don’t you do a CSHL course and we could build the robots.” So about a year later we had our first course. It was in the new Marks building. The building was dedicated and the very next day we started the course! In 36 hours we built these large DNA microarray robots so we had the largest print capacity of DNA microarrays than anywhere else in the world (only for two weeks because it was all taken apart and shipped, we kept one). But that was a pretty intense course and now it has evolved so now they don’t build robots anymore they analyze the microarrays. The first time around Joe DeRisi and Vishy Iyer - two of the instructors in the course- had actually come a month ahead of time to check and my kids helped to build the first microarray robots because we were doing a test to see if it was possible to do it in that amount of time. It went so quickly we actually spent the whole afternoon at my house. I actually have these great pictures of them on a trampoline in our garden so it worked out well!