People Told Us It Was Impossible: UCSC’s Mark Akeson on Nanopore Sequencing

Mark Akeson has been working on nanopore sequencing at UC Santa Cruz’s biophysics lab for twenty years. Up until the past few years with the launch of Oxford Nanopore’s sequencers, that work was mostly the methodical toil of the quiet inventor. Today it is quite ordinary to see a sequencer the size of your wallet being taken out into the field for DNA work. But for years, the naysayers dominated. “Back in the day, the skeptics outnumbered the proponents 99 to 1,” Mark says in today’s show.