The results were nothing short of stunning. “Ho Lee Sh**”, I think the customer said. Nobody had ever seen that histogram before. The cell populations were extremely separable. The cells were quite happy after removal of the undesired sex. They went away afterwards and we never heard what they did with the IP.

But the damn thing worked!

This was a first ever sort of thing for a small company in Canada. They wanted to separate bull sperm into viable male/female cells for the ranchers who want more bulls or more cows. The consulting team, my people were a genius physics-optics PhD, another amazing optics guy who made sense of the first guy’s vision, a genius fluidics guy who designed the Flow Cell, an amazing biologist who told us if the cells were getting unhappy with the machinery and how many were still usable after their journey, me, the technical lead, and a fantastic cytometry guy for a customer. We got it all working in a few months.