No one really knew whether mass spectrometry was up to the task of population screening. Could the instruments cope with the tens-of-thousands of dried blood spots that needed to be analyzed every year? In the mid 1990s, Dr. Mike Morris began working with newborn screening labs around the world...

For the 30 years following Dr. Robert Guthrie's invention of a PKU screening test newborn screening tests were limited in number. That all changed when biochemists at Duke University first applied tandem mass spectrometry to solve a puzzling clinical case. The result changed the way the newborn...