Joseph DeRisi is a young scientist who at age 39 has already racked up some amazing career achievements. He tells about his new DNA chip for detecting viruses:

My colleague Dave Wang and I were sitting around the office one day in 2000 asking, “How were viruses discovered in the past?”

We knew that it had always been a laborious and time-consuming effort. When an epidemic struck, what researchers generally did was go to electron microscopes and try to figure out what they were seeing. Sometimes, it took 10, 20 years to find a virus they knew had to be in there.

Earlier, when I was a Stanford graduate student, I’d worked on developing DNA microarrays, which are often called DNA chips. They allow a researcher to do many biological tests at once. The chips are now widely used in gene discovery, cancer detection, drug discovery and toxicology. So Dave and I reasoned that these DNA microarrays would be perfect for viral discovery. I said, “We can build a similar device representing every virus ever discovered, and it could simultaneously look for them.”

I admire what DeRisi has achieved, but every time I read about the achievements of rising stars in biology, I'm struck by the fact that for most of them, development of a new technology has really been their breakthrough achievement, as opposed to a paradigm-shifting discovery. Technology, more than anything else, is driving biology these days. New ideas about biology itself are playing less of a role.