Professor Stephen Quake named Inventor of the Year

Stanford bioengineer Stephen Quake has been named Inventor of the Year by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association for discovering ingenious ways to extract information from DNA.

Quake, the Lee Otterson Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering, has pioneered the analysis of DNA fragments that spill out of dead cells. He has devised ways techniques to fish these fragments out of the bloodstream and use them as clues to diagnose a variety of ailments, including cancer.

Quake joins a select group of innovators who have been honored over the last four decades by the Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Law Association, whose members include experts on patents, copyrights and trade secrets.

Previous Inventors of the Year have included Robert Noyce, co- founder of Intel Corporation and an inventor of the microprocessor; Stanley N. Cohen, the Stanford geneticist who is a co-inventor of gene splicing; and Ronald W. Davis, who has made many contributions to DNA analysis though his work with the Stanford Genome Technology Center.

This latest award suggests that Quake’s discoveries also have the potential to open up new areas of knowledge and disease treatment.