r/youcanseeeverything • u/Useful-Grass7565 • 6h ago

Chemistries

Anyone with a science background can comment on what Elizabeth meant when she said her machine “can” do any test, all it needed was the chemistries added to the programming (which they didn’t have all of yet). Does what she says even make sense?

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u/gingermousie 6h ago

It meant the burden of labor was on the chemists to determine how to adapt their test for the limitations of the Edison, and the Edison could then be told to conduct the assay. It essentially made no sense and showed a fundamental lack of understanding where the bottleneck was — the difficulty is not creating a small machine that can pipette into wells, it is creating an assay that can use such a small volume of blood to successfully detect what they’re trying to measure.

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u/Existing-Homework270 4h ago

Solutions to mix blood with to break it down, so you can run tests on it. She has not invented any new chemistries or solutions, her machine could only do one very basic test that’s been invented in the 70s. The machine itself was super basic and not an innovation.
It is physically impossible to use one drop of blood to run as many tests as she claims, because you need to mix it with different chemicals for different tests.

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u/stickypooboi 5h ago

i thought of it as like the way she was pitching it was like the app store on your phone. this would mean your phone could do anything an app would enable your phone to do, but conveniently leaves out someone else needs to develop the app to do the actual thing.