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Thank you very much. It's an honour to be here tonight and to receive this prestigious award. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr Takeda and the entire Takeda Foundation for this recognition, and I proudly share this award with Dr Brown and all of my colleagues at Affymetrix.
In the late 1980's the effort to sequence the human genome was just beginning, and we imagined how we could create a technology that could be used as an information storage device for the human genome. And looking back now this field of DNA micro-arrays is really truly amazing at how quickly this technology has evolved and adopted. To put this in perspective: back in the mid-1990's scientists were still doing experiments on the human genome one gene at a time, and in fact the evolution of this technology has now allowed scientists to perform these experiments on thousands of genes simultaneously.
And getting back to the spirit of the Takeda Award and developing new technologies for the betterment of mankind I would like to reflect on the fact that in the early to mid-1990's I was approached by individuals in various industries that really questioned why one would need to look at thousands of genes simultaneously. And at that time there was not an obvious commercial need for this type of technology - but through the efforts that we performed at Affymetrix, and through the efforts of individuals such as Pat Brown here, this technology succeeded and as a result we continued our development of the technology and really developed the industry as it is blossoming today. The technology today is being used broadly in the pharmaceutical industry, and being used to really unravel the molecular basis of life. I believe one of the near term uses of this technology for human health will very much be in the use of diagnosis and the therapeutic treatment options in cancer which should benefit a high percentage of the population. But we're at a point now where we're at the very beginning of understanding the genome - the vast information content of the genome is just beginning to be unravelled. We've recently completed a study with Perlegen Sciences to begin to observe the basic patterns of human diversity within us all and have really begun to confirm the realisation that we are all much more alike than sometimes we wish to believe. But it's rewarding to see, just after a decade of technology development and access, such a key role this technology is playing.
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