This lady is an equipment vendor's worst nightmare. I didn't even know Shrinky Dinks were still being made.
In 2006, Michelle Khine arrived at the University of California's brand-new Merced campus eager to establish her first lab. She was experimenting with tiny liquid-filled channels in hopes of devising chip-based diagnostic tests, a discipline called microfluidics. The trouble was, the specialized equipment that she previously used to make microfluidic chips cost more than $100,000--money that wasn't immediately available. "I'm a very impatient person," says Khine, now an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. "I wanted to figure out how I could set things up really quickly."
Racking her brain for a quick-and-dirty way to make microfluidic devices, Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven. "I thought if I could print out the at a certain resolution and then make them shrink, I could make channels the right size for microfluidics," she says.
...
Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.
...
Khine plans to use her chips to detect various medical conditions, and she hopes the cheap and portable devices will someday be used to diagnose HIV and other infections at the bedside. She has also found that by growing stem cells in a Shrinky Dink device that contains wells instead of channels, she can coax them to become heart muscle cells. Such a tool might allow researchers trying to grow those cells for tissue transplants to control the process more closely.
Douglas Crawford, associate executive director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, sees advantages in Khine's approach. "Michelle's technique is better, faster, and cheaper--it can put microfluidic prototyping into the hands of every lab," he says.
http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&TRID=764
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