Elaine Mardis lives for dream machines, from her glossy red Audi S5 to the roomful of shiny new DNA sequencers housed at the Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. As co-director of the institute and director of technology development, Mardis leads teams that are using genome science to transform the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
A self-professed tech geek, Mardis has been a pioneer of the technological breakthroughs that made it possible to decrypt the 3 billion-plus A’s and T’s, G’s and C’s that make up the human genome.
Since the 1990s, her team has often been the first to test-drive new sequencing machines. They sequenced the first whole animal, the flatworm, in 1998, and then pushed the systems to handle big chunks of bigger genomes — billions of base pairs.
