Steve Quake

I'd say we are very mature in our ability to amplify and sequence the genome of a single cell, amplify and sequence the transcriptome of a single cell,

You can ask, is one cell enough to make a biological conclusion?

And maybe I think what you're referring to is people want to see replicates.

And so you can ask how many cells you need to see to have confidence in any given biological conclusion, which is a reasonable thing.

It's a statistical question in good science.

Um, I think, uh, I've been very impressed with how the mass spec people have been doing recently.

I think they've finally cracked the ability to look at proteins from single cells and they can look at a couple thousand proteins.

I mean, that, that was, you know, I think one of these nature method of the year things at the

Yeah, they are over the hump with single cell measurements.

Part of what's missing right now, I think, is the ability to reliably do all of that on the same cell.

So this is what Charlotte was referring to, be able to do sort of multi-molded measurements on single cells.

That's kind of in its infancy.

And there's a few examples, but there's a lot more work to be done on that.

And I think also the fact that these measurements are all destructive right now.

And so you're losing the ability to look how the cells evolve over time.

You've got to say this time point, I'm going to dissect this thing and look at a state.

And I don't get to see what happens further down the road.

So that's another future, I think, measurement challenge to be addressed.

as scientists and members of the sort of larger community, we want to be careful and ensure that we're interacting with people who set policy in a way that ensures that these tools are being used to advance the cause of science and not do things that are detrimental to human health and are used in a way that respects patient privacy.

And so the ethics around how you use all this with respect to individuals is going to be important to be thoughtful about from the beginning.