jzahir

A lifelong ambition of mine has always been to be part of a team of people who race past the conventional boundaries and are surprised by every new possibility.  Where being creative was a habit that you couldn’t turn off and no terrain of thought was forbidding.

There is a cozy little shop in Spokane, Washington that smells of photoresist, solder and machining coolant oil where that happens every day.

When I was there from 2001 through 2003 we had just enough contractual work to  produce just enough surplus energy to get the next contract.  But the culture there placed such a high value on creative and innovative approaches that it was the funnest place I’ve ever worked at.

The principal (seated on the right) is the president of the company who holds several patents including several very successful patents in holography.

One of the ideas he tried to patent was an electronic sensor of oligonucleotides based on two facts: The different weight of the base pairs in a single strand of DNA and the fact that there exists a resonant frequency for any oscillating body.

My work involved preparing gold plated test slides for attaching the 5′ end of oligonucleotides of known composition.  When a complimentary nucleotide bonded with this, it could be attached to the sensor and then separated by heating and tested for its composition.

Each sensor cell consisted of a gold foil diaphragm that would be set to oscillating by a frequency generator with reflected light measuring the degree of deformation of the diaphragm.  The frequency that took the least energy to maintain would be the resonant frequency of that cell of the sensor.

Adding weight to the cell would change that frequency.

Unfortunately someone else was awarded this patent first and the proof of concept development stopped.

Strange that.  Why is it that every time I join efforts with really creative people, I end up building the ACME widget that ends up with Wiley Coyote at the bottom of a grand canyon?