Faster DNA Testing

tkjtkj writes "Physorg.com is reporting that a Rochester,NY, company, 'Thermal Gradients, Inc' has produced a new method of DNA analysis that can reduce the required time from hours to minutes that the usual 'Polymerase Chain Reacion' (PCR) takes to produce the large quantity of sample DNA needed to identify the donor. This could,conceivably, make "Instant DNA Identification" a reality! Will air travel now require one to arrive at the airport 5 minutes earlier than usual, to provide a skin-swab sample before boarding the plane?"

Comments

Re:Only 5 minutes??

[TheRaven64]

Since this is Slashdot, I'll give a computer-related analogy. Once upon a time, there were silicon chips which could do calculations. They did them one at a time, waiting for one to be completed before starting the next one. Then someone came up with the idea of pipelining. You would start fetching one instruction while the previous one was being decoded, and start decoding it while the previous one was executing. Next, someone came up with the idea of a superscalar design - you could have two or more of these pipelines, and as long as a pair of instructions didn't depend on each other, you could execute them at once.

You see how this fits? You take the DNA sample, let people proceed to the next phase (e.g. baggage checking). Then, you scan their passports five or more minutes later and stop them if their DNA doesn't match.