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.
The ink will work on silicon solar panels as well as those using alternative materials such as cadmium telluride (used by First Solar in the U.S.) or copper indium gallium selenide (used by Solar Frontier in Japan).