New Horizons in Science

Skip Garner, a physicist who has worked in artificial intelligence, fusion and high-temperature superconductors, is now devising expert systems of value in biomedical research. He’s devised a Medline search tool, called Iridescent, that finds correlations between papers that is leading to hitherto unsuspected new uses of existing drugs. Another project, using gene chips to detect repetitive strands of DNA, has produced a surprising result: a measure of an individual’s susceptibility to cancer.