 My name is Samuel Bierg and I'm the head laser technician at the DNA Medicine Institute based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were excited when we first heard about the competition because we're already working on blood testing equipment and we're working on what's hopefully the world's smallest flow cytometer, which uses microfluidics and lasers to analyze and count cells. We've been doing work with NASA, they've given us some money and we've helped develop technology for them to try to look at certain biomarkers that relate to space travel. Single molecule fluorescence scanning means you're using some sort of intense source of light, usually lasers, to excite a molecule, in this case DNA, so brightly that you can measure the amount of light that's emitted just by that one molecule. And I can tell you a lot of things about the molecule that you can't see when you have more molecules together. We're developing a product that we call nano strips, which are little fluorescent particles that we're running through our instrument and depending on how strongly those fluoresce we can determine certain things about your health depending on what test we're trying to run. For this competition, one of the basic things is you have to be able to read vital signs and then there's a certain list of diseases that you have to be able to diagnose. We're basing this on the star tricorder and for that you just kind of hold it up and wave it up and down and it makes some noises and some lights flash and then you have all the information you need. And that would be amazing and if there's any team in this competition that can make a product that will do that then they absolutely deserve first, second and third place prize if they can do all that. But I think realistically you need to strike a balance between, you know, patient needs of use, patient comfort and being able to actually diagnose the diseases that we're working on here. You know, I don't think a lot of the teams here really have a good system beyond the bioscience of how they're going to diagnose those. I think without looking into the blood it's going to be very difficult to diagnose a lot of these diseases and that's sort of where we're starting from. Just trying to get as much information as we can out of a drop of blood. That was sort of our goal even before we entered the competition. Other teams have come at this from an industrial design point of view first where we're going to make the sleekest product and ours is not going to be the sleekest product but I think we've got a huge leg up on the actual diagnostic side of things and then we just need to get everything into a form factor that people are comfortable with.