Jacob Kimmel

They form these big, what we call colonies, because it's like a single cell that just proliferates and forms a bunch of copies of itself.

Right.

They form these colonies.

You can see with your eyeballs by holding the dish up to the light and looking for opaque little dots on the bottom.

You don't need any fancy instruments.

And then you could stain them with this particular stain and they would turn blue based on the genetic reporter he had.

So now we look at those key features of the problem and we pick any other problem we're interested in.

I'm interested in aging, so that's the one I'm going to pick for explanation.

how difficult is it to measure the likelihood of success or whether you've achieved success for cell age?

Well, it turns out age is much more complicated in terms of discriminating function than actually just comparing two types of cells.

An old liver cell and a young liver cell, prima facie actually look pretty darn similar.

It's actually quite nuanced, the ways in which they're distinct.

And so there isn't a simple trivial system where you just like label your one favorite gene or you can just

Just give the young cells cancer.

Just make the old ones cancer, and then they'll grow.

Yeah, Dorcas, you've solved it for me.

So there's no trivial way that you can tell whether or not you've succeeded.

You actually need a pretty complex molecular measurement.

And so for us, a real key enabling technology, and I don't think our approach would really have been possible until it's emerged, was something called single-cell genomics.

So you now take a cell, rip it open, sequence all the mRNAs it's using.