Goodfellow's unit has so miniaturized the mass screening of such compounds that machines now replicate the countless experiments in pinhead-size droplets--1, 536 tiny wells on envelope-size plates--a process that formerly took humans untold man-hours.

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Mass screening of this sort is not, itself, a new idea in the search for drugs, but extending it so that it can study effects on entire animals rather than just isolated cells should make it even more productive.

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At the laboratory of Aurora, a San Diego-based firm specializing in such mass screening, little needles squirt a billionth of a liter of a potential drug into 3, 456 millimeter-wide wells. (The squirters come from another silicon-based business: ink-jet printers.) In the wells are biologically interesting molecules, such as enzymes, or cells that may present targets to new medicines.

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