ISSCC 2017: P3: Jonathan Rothberg, The Development of High-Speed DNA Sequencing

The Development of High-Speed DNA Sequencing: Jurassic Park, Neanderthal, Moore & You

Jonathan Rothberg
Founder, 4Catalyzer and Adjunct Professor of Genetics,
Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT

Since Watson and Crick’s 1953 landmark discovery that biological information was encoded in DNA as a sequence of chemical building-block “letters”, developing technology for reading (or sequencing) this chemical code has been fundamental to advances in biology and medicine.
Techniques that first enabled this were invented by Sanger in 1978, and were taken to massively parallel form by ‘454 Life Sciences’ in 2003. This ushered in the current or “next- gen” era of genome sequencing technologies for research, medicine, and the emerging field of Genomic Personalized Medicine, in which healthcare is more fully informed by the individual’s personal genetic makeup. If Sanger was the mainframe of sequencing, ‘454’ was the minicomputer – smaller and faster and establishing the key guiding technical principals.
To further scale, reduce cost, and democratize the technology, I turned back to the developments of Noyce and Moore, and developed the first semiconductor-based sequencing technology to make it truly personal. We demonstrated this by sequencing the genome of Gordon Moore of Moore’s Law fame.
This talk will discuss the evolution of semiconductor devices capable of performing DNA sequencing, and how the use of a scalable CMOS chip architecture allows for radical levels of economic scaling, and convenient new formats (from desktop to portable).