I love the attitude that this video portrays, perhaps I'm being naive but the desire to collaborate and learn seems to radiate from the scientists in this little clip, and the subject is pretty cool too. They are trying to invent a molecular device that is able to sequence human DNA in a couple of hours. Currently this is an expensive process (the first human genome sequenced cost $3Bn and took many years to do!), these guys want to get the cost down to a 1000 bucks per sequencing.
The scales at which they are working are just mind boggling, never mind passing a camel through the eye of a needle this device will need to control a single thread of DNA passing through a hole which is measured on the nanometre scale, that's 1 billionth of a metre, to put this into perspective an HIV virus is about 400nm long, even smaller than MP's pay rises this year!
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