The nobel laureate Sydney Brenner said, in 1963, that 'progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order'. The silicon valley startup Halcyon Molecular has assembled a highly interdisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and physicists to develop a new technique for sequencing DNA by straightening single chemically-labeled strands on an electron transparent substrate and then reading the sequence directly from electron micrographs. The success of this technology (and/or its competitors) will allow vast databases of DNA sequences to be populated, which in turn will enable the sequences to become clinically relevant. The author experienced the revelation that he could be a more effective scientist in a startup environment in silicon valley than as a principal investigator running the UK aberration corrected microscopy facility. An outline of the technology will be presented together with a discussion of the implications of cost effective accurate long read length sequencing.

Sequencing DNA by looking at it: Seeing chemistry with atoms rather than ensembles of atoms (or, "Why I left a full professorship to join a startup")

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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