By Aaron J. Sender

When 30-year National Institute of Mental Health veteran Michael Brownstein first submitted his proposal to study gene expression in mice brains to the institute’s Animal Care and Use Committee, “there was a gasp in the room,” he says. To get just a first pass, low-resolution picture, “I would probably need to kill many hundreds if not thousands of animals,” says Brownstein. “And people said, ‘Gee, isn’t there something you can do about that?’”