A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Austin to share the latest about CZI’s work at South by Southwest.
I was in conversation with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. I happen to know that Emily is a fellow parent, so when she asked me to talk about the state of biomedical science, I drew a comparison to a topic of mutual interest.
Legos.
If you spend any time with kids, you probably know that Lego sets have gotten pretty elaborate. I remember scrounging around in a box of generic pieces. But these days, you can buy the Millennium Falcon and build it step by step. Super cool. Thousands of tiny parts.
The human body is like the Millennium Falcon++. There are trillions of cells, and billions of molecules inside each one. Every one of those pieces needs to snap together perfectly to make a healthy person.
In biology, we basically have the parts list at the front of the instruction manual. That’s what we figured out when we sequenced the human genome decades ago. Our genes tell us all the little molecular pieces, like proteins, that make up a cell.
What biologists don’t have is the rest of the instructions. For the Millennium Falcon, there are maybe a thousand steps to build the ship. To make a person, there are so many more. How do you build a heart cell? How is that different from a lung cell? We don’t really know. And we haven’t invented the technology to figure it out.
CZI’s goal is to build that technology.
We want to give scientists the tools to understand how all the parts of human cells come together, and how cells interact with each other. Because if we know how all the pieces fit, we’ll have a much better idea of how to fix the body when it breaks.
