How can mankind take advantage of electricity? What can you do with a transistor? What is a PC supposed to do on the internet? Most of the pioneers of the modern information age have been ridiculed by these questions in the early stages of their discoveries. And also many of these fine people have undountedly underestimated the impact of theirresearch much like it is hard for parents to predict the future achievementsof their children from their elementary school education. They just know that on the basis of a decent education, "something good" will happen.
While the potential of microelectronics and information technology is now widely acknowledged, there is still a lot to explore in its neighborhood. How about integrating mere information processing with the acquisitionof information from the real world. In a traditional laboratory for instance ,information is usually obtained from a measurement setup which interfaces over an electronic bus with a computer. Can we integrate physical dataacquisition and processing?
Microtechnology has demonstrated that incorporating physical, chemical and optical sensing capability with microelectronics is indeed feasible. On the analogy, molecular biology is now on the verge of turning medicine into an information science. Even though this development is still in its infancy, experts forecast that this step will revolutionize medicine andbiology from a predominantly emperical sciences more towards the "exact" sciences like physics.
For this to happen, the gap between the nanoworld of complex biomolecules and our manipulation and sensing tools has to be bridged. One way is direct interaction, for example with modern tools like atomic force microscopetips. However, this mechanical approach is cumbersome in practice and doesnot comply with the natural mode of interaction. Almost all biomoleculesin a living organism are within or at least in contact with some kind ofa liquid matrix - mostly water - by which they are transported and herethey encounter there reaction partners.
Microfluidic devices in a certain sense mimick this natural environment. Engineering allows to equip these artificial systems with functionality to manipulate and detect biomolecules in their natural environment. Overthelast decade microfluidics has unquestionally evolved to one of the keyenabling technologies in the life sciences.