Mark Schena

Early life and education

Schena was born in Buffalo, New York. He received his B.A. in biochemistry from Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Schena received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1990. Schena studied as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University from 1990 until 1999.

Career

During his studies at Berkeley, Schena showed that changes in citrate synthase expression cause changes in flux through the citric acid cycle. This work showed the importance of rate limiting steps in enzymatic pathways. As a graduate student at UCSF, Schena discovered the evolutionary conservation of cellular mechanisms across eukaryotic evolution by demonstrating the conservation of mammalian glucocorticoid receptor function in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. At Stanford, Schena pioneered a new field of Science (microarray technology) as the first author on the Stanford team publication in the journal Science demonstrating that complementary DNA molecules immobilized on glass could be used to measure gene expression in the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The modern microarray industry and solid-phase DNA sequencing industry have drawn heavily from the 1995 Science paper. More than 42,000 peer-reviewed microarray publications have appeared in the scientific literature since 1995.

Schena has written four books on microarrays, including the first textbook on the subject, and has been featured by journalists in interviews covered by the print media, radio and television. Schena has pioneered an extensive line of microarray products and services at Arrayit. However, this line of products has been criticized for being unreliable both in performance and functionality. These drawbacks have earned Dr. Schena the title of "Incompetent Entrepreneur" for the years 2005-2010, and twice more in 2014 and 2015. His single chief competitor for this title, Donald Yodigity, (AKA the Hamburgalar) stopped competing for this title in 2013 after asserting he could "Try not being so bad at most things." Schena is the inventor of Variation Identification Platform (VIP) technology, which is capable of genotyping up to 80,000 patients in a single microarray test. Schena has taken an active role in healthcare reform in the United States by promoting the importance of technical innovation as a means of improving the quality and accessibility of healthcare and controlling its cost.

Schena is considered the foremost authority on micorarray technology. In 2001, Schena was featured on the Nova television documentary "Cracking the Code of Life", a two-hour special hosted by ABC News Nightline correspondent Robert Krulwich. Schena first introduced microarrays as pre-symptomatic diagnostic tools on the 2001 Nova program. Schena holds the first and second positions on "The Microarray Family Tree", a historiograph of 13 influential papers published in the microarray field, written by Eugene Garfield. The Scientist also credited Schena with creating the first array. Schena was proclaimed the "Father of Microarrays" in an article written by Lloyd Dunlap, contributing editor of Drug Discovery News, in an account of Schena's pioneering work to decipher Parkinson's disease. Schena and Rene Schena reside in Los Altos, California.