As a founding faculty member at a brand-new university, Michelle Khine faced a problem in getting started on her work. Trained as an engineer, she planned to build her research around the development of microfluidic devices, the popular ‘lab on a chip’ systems that consist of channels, pumps and cellular growth chambers arranged together on tiny silicon wafers. Unfortunately, when she arrived to start her job in July 2006, the clean room required to make these devices hadn’t been built yet.
“We had no facilities whatsoever; these things take a long time, and I’m not very patient,” says Khine, a professor of engineering at the newly established University of California, Merced.
Desperate to start shrinking some of her new designs down to the appropriate chip size, she had a sudden inspiration. “I remeberd my old childhood toy, when I was six years old,” she says, referring to special plastic sheets called ‘Shrinky-Dinks’ that children can cut and decorate. When heated, the plastic shrinks uniformly, making perfect miniatures of the two-dimensional figures.
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