Here Is a Human Being by Misha Angrist Page A

Biosystems was the company that won the race to develop automated sequencing in the 1990s. By convincing bad-boy scientist Craig Venter to undertake a private effort to sequence the human genome and compete with the government’s Human Genome Project, ABI became the arms dealer that catered to both sides of the war. Venter and the NIH-sponsored public effort each bought hundreds of ABI’s instruments at three hundred thousand dollars a pop. And with the company’s model 3700 (and its successor, the 3730) installed as the industry standard, ABI could then charge lots of money for reagents: proprietary molecular bullets for the company’s high-tech guns. It was a brilliant move and it helped to keep ABI’s balance sheet deep in the black and its machines entrenched in hundreds of molecular genetics labs for the better part of a decade. 5 But now obsolescence was in sight: the wealthier labs had already begun to switch to the new platforms and draw down sequencing on the old machines. 6 In 2009, I saw a used 3700 on eBay for about $3,500, shipped. In another auction, its predecessor, the 377, was sold for a winning bid of $99.
    In the suite at the Marriott I helped myself to a glass of red wine and inspected the Polonator up close. Even someone who had no idea what it was had to be impressed with the aesthetics. It was electric blue, a much bolder color than any of the competition’s wares. Its glass door was flanked above and below by bands of orange racing stripes. Inside were all of the usual moving parts characteristic of a next-gen sequencer: a robotic platform to cradle the flow cell—that is, the small piece of glass that held the DNA to be sequenced; a charge-coupled device camera to record the images of each base after it was incorporated; and lots of tiny capillary tubes that moved enzymes and other reagents in and out of the flow cell. Next to it was a computer whose job it was to instruct the Polonator. And lo and behold, this Polonator was actually on! Its lights were flashing and its parts humming as they moved stuff from one place to the other. If this thing worked, I thought, I might actually get my sequence someday.
    The man who had taken the technology from the Church lab and turned it into an exemplar of sleek design was Kevin McCarthy. Were one to draft a prototypical George colleague from the technology sector, Kevin would probably be pretty close to the final iteration: a tousled mop of gray hair, skinny with a buttoned-down shirt, oversize wire-rimmed glasses. An engineer not entirely comfortable as pitchman but full of ardent belief in his product. An inventor.
    A year earlier, McCarthy, who’d been put on to the Church lab by a sales rep, was being escorted to Harvard Medical School to meet with George’s team. But his coworker/driver got lost in the medical school maze. By the time they made it to George’s office, they had all of fifteen minutes to make their pitch. “And it wasn’t like they were dying to see us,” McCarthy said. 7
    At the time the Polonator was much closer to a science fair project than a commercial product. When I first visited, “Polonator Central” was still a small windowless room within the sprawling Church lab. Inside a boom box throbbed with the Rolling Stones’
Steel Wheels.
The first thing one noticed was the temperature: 18° C, or about 64° F. Ligase, the enzyme used to stitch DNA together in the “Polonation” process, liked it cool; early versions of the Polonator had no onboard refrigeration (or onboard much of anything), so Church protégés Jay Shendure and Greg
    Porreca had to keep the ambient temperature down. The room was littered with tangles of black wires connecting microscopes to computers on stainless steel shelves. Space was so tight that the keyboards dangled vertically over the sides; Rube Goldberg would have been proud. Each one of these makeshift arrangements had been named after a character from
The Simpsons.
Marge, I noticed, was in