Steve Quake

Yeah, I mean, so a big part of my career has been trying to develop new measurement technologies that will provide insight into biology.

And decades ago, that was understanding molecules.

Now it's understanding more complex biological things like cells.

And it was like a natural progression.

I mean, we built the sequencers.

sequence the genomes, done, right?

And it was clear that people were just going to do that at scale then and, you know, create lots of data.

Hopefully knowledge would get out of that.

But for me as an academic, I never wanted to, never thought I'd be in the position I'm in now, let's put it that way.

I just wanted to keep running a small research group.

So I realized,

I would have to get out of the genome thing and find the next frontier.

And it became this intersection of microfluidics and genomics, which as you know, I spent a lot of time developing microfluidic tools to analyze cells and try to do single cell biology to understand their heterogeneity.

And that through a winding path led me to all these cell atlases and to where we are now.

Absolutely.

I mean, there's so much great discovery to be done on the boundary between fields.

I trained as a physicist and, you know, kind of made my career this boundary between physics and biology and technology development.

And it's just sort of been the gift that keeps on giving.

You know, there's a new way to measure something.

You discover something new scientifically and it just all suggests new things to measure.