What We Don’t Know

Did you know that we have far more senses than five? Or that the true primary colors, scientifically speaking, aren’t red, yellow and blue but magenta, yellow and cyan? Or that we don’t taste “bitter” in the back of our tongues and “sweet” on the tip? These commonly held scientific “facts” actually are just beliefs based on long-ago bad information, and yet somehow, they persist in our classrooms. The dismantling begins in college when the biology (or chemistry or physics) professor starts to disabuse students of all the misinformation that began in elementary school and lasted all the way through high school.

College students face reality twofold when they really start to study a subject in depth. First, they might learn that the facts they learned from K-12 were simplified to be understood better, and the reality is much more complex and interesting. And second, science doesn’t have all the answers—not by far. Students studying DNA, for instance, may know that James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discovered the famous double helix shape in 1953. However, we didn’t sequence DNA until 1972. Okay, that may not be too impressive to a millennial born in 1996 entering college this semester. To them, 1976 may as well be 1876. But sitting in a classroom today and learning that the human genome was only completely read in 2003, and that it was the result of a 13-year, 18-country effort is pretty impressive. Yet students can still ask their professor, “What is the exact definition of a gene?” or, more complexly, “What drives genetic change at a molecular level?” and the true answer is, “We don’t really know… yet.” And that’s what inspires future discoverers.

Jonathan M. Rothberg, Ph.D., is one of the scientists that worked on sequencing the first individual human genome. In 2005, Rothberg and his colleagues published their method for decoding the genome 100 times faster than the older Sanger technique. This new method was dubbed next-generation sequencing, and it has opened the door to better disease diagnostic techniques. As a character on the popular TV show “Grey’s Anatomy” said this season, genomics is like having the answers in the back of the textbook. Diseases, especially hereditary ailments such as Alzheimer’s or cancer, can be predicted very early on and therefore treated better, with genome sequencing technology.

Rothberg’s skill is in marrying his high-level expertise in genome sequencing with semiconductors that perform genome analysis. He has founded and sold two DNA-sequencing companies, Branford, Conn.-based 454 and San Francisco, Calif.-based Ion Torrent Systems for $500 million. His latest venture was announced on Nov. 3, the first startup to come out of Rothberg’s healthcare company incubator 4Combinator: Butterfly Network Inc. The company has raised $100 million for a medical imaging device he claims will be as “cheap as a stethoscope” and will make physicians’ jobs “100 times easier.” According to patent documents, the technology is based on a new type of ultrasound chip hoped to create new ways to destroy cancer cells via heat or deliver information to brain cells.

MIT Technology Review reported that Rothberg is being very hush-hush about this new technology, but he did say, “The details will come out when we are on stage selling it. That’s in the next 18 months.” He guarantees it will be small, cost a few hundred dollars, connect to a phone, and be able to perform tasks including diagnosing breast cancer or visualizing a fetus in-utero. In 1994, Stanford University Professor Butrus Khuri-Yakub, Ph.D., (who advises Rothberg’s company) built the first micromachined ultrasound chip. Despite years of interest from medtech giants such as General Electric and Philips, the technology was never a commercial success. These tiny chips didn’t function reliably and were difficult to manufacture.

“The vision for this product has been around for many years. It remains to be seen whether someone can make it into a market-validated reality,” said Richard Przybyla, head of circuit design at Chirp Microsystems, a startup in Berkeley, Calif. Chirp is developing ultrasound systems that allow computers to recognize human gestures. “Perhaps what was needed all along is a large investment and a dedicated team.”

Rothberg certainly has those, and if his past successes are anything to go by, it looks like this chip will finally find its way to market in 2016 as he predicts. And years from now, students in classrooms will be able to wonder at how it was only in 2016 that we began to be able to see inside the human body with our iPhones.