Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 33 Time to Go

Max knew Arsalan was right about going back to the US, and the need was greater than even Arsalan imagined. The physical realization of his ideas was held back by the absence of the right kind of facilities in Paris. To move forward and become the pioneering big-swinging dick he felt was his due, he had to be working at a university where they had a MEMS lab, and maybe even a semiconductor lab. Microelectromechanical systems, the generic name for many tiny machines, were often built using the same materials and techniques of miniaturization and of mass production used for semiconductor integrated circuits. Max conceived his sequencers as MEMS devices.

After the epiphany that had set him on this course, Max had holed up in his ens office trying to imagine how to miniaturize the instruments of capillary electrophoresis that were the standard of the day. Nothing came to him except a casual reference that one of the biologists had made. Loosely translated, she said, “A cell is like no beaker of stuff. It’s too full.”

More than a decade later, in Max’s handwritten notes for a talk he gave to the Gunn High School (of Palo Alto) biotechnology class on the history of his early work, he described how “over and over, this message was repeated in my head, a koan I couldn’t escape. Gradually the cloak around its meaning unraveled. If there was more chemistry going on in a cell than any beaker could manage, then chemistry that did work in a beaker could certainly be done in a cell, and even in something simpler. A droplet is simpler than a cell. The chemistries of DNA sequencing can be done in a beaker. Ergo, we can hope to do DNA sequencing in a cell-sized drop. But how do you hold such a thing? With tweezers? In a depression on a glass slide? Maybe those would be possible, but why not put the little proto-cell in an immiscible fluid matrix and apply the principles of hydraulics for transport?”

What he meant was that since oil and water don’t mix, and the reactions of DNA sequencing take place in water, a droplet—or a picobeaker in Max’s phraseology—full of sequencing chemistry would remain stable in oil, the fluid matrix he mentioned. In a channel etched in a MEMS device, the droplet-bearing oil would move forward or back depending on the pressure applied at the channel’s end; imagine pushing on a piece of dry spaghetti in a straw. The tiny spheroids would move along with the matrix. Genius! Max is a genius.

Max’s concept depended on valves to switch the matrix to one of several different channels, and a method to merge drops on demand, and more. He would have fun inventing these things, he told Arsalan, as they didn’t exist at the time, and he thought he already knew enough to begin work on them, so that’s where he started his experimental program.

Water droplets in oil form an emulsion, an emulsion is a colloid, and Paris was thick in colloidal chemists and physicists. Max spent many hours talking to leading scholars there. Academics in Paris gave no thought to patents in those days. Arsalan had advised Max about their importance. The conversations led to notebooks full of ideas about surfactants, van der Waals forces, Reynolds numbers, and more, and the books became the basis for his patent applications when he returned to the US.

Max intuited what Prof. John G. King would later tell him at MIT, “A good physicist makes a lot of mistakes quickly.” He understood that he must take an appointment where there was an already-operating MEMS lab, because without it, without even a simple one, he would waste time traveling, deal with loads of soul-numbing bureaucracy, be subject to someone’s whims or failures, and become a second-rate figure, not—as he intended—the best in the field. That’s what would happen to him in Paris, and why he had to go back to the States where he hadn’t lived for the better part of a decade, and where he’d felt forced to leave when he did. Every day away from the position, and placement he didn’t yet have, felt like a day lost.