Yeah, technology. What is it all about?

No time in history has anyone had access to these kinds of technologies to understand the biology at that level that we can do now.

That's a huge, huge difference maker.

And so that's one of the ways that certainly our tools are being used to others as well.

Like when you're generating a vaccine, what kind of effect is having on the patient on their biology, on their immune system. And so we can see this at a level that we just could

not even contemplate even a few years ago.

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and

inside the minds of the top people in tech.

I am your host, Danny Fortson, the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times,

and I am back from my quote-unquote holiday, sheltering place here in my house in Oakland.

Can't say it was the most relaxing or restful

vacation, but we're all healthy, so I'm going to still count it as a win. And now we're back

with another podcast. And depending on how the next day goes, this will hopefully be the first

of two episodes headed your way in the next few days.

So just keep your eye on the feed.

On this pod, though, we have a very interesting guest.

Serge Saxonov.

He is an entrepreneur who fled the Soviet Union as it collapsed.

He ended up in New York. And these days he runs 10x Genomics, a maker of a very powerful machine that allows researchers to see down

to the single cellular level. And if you don't know what that really means, it's fine. I didn't really either. But Saxonov is very good at explaining why this is a big deal, especially as we race to find a vaccine for COVID-19. So 10x machines are being used around the world in labs who are dissecting the virus, trying to figure out how

it works, and that's how we might try to attack it.

So you can think of their machines, I'm just making this up, but think of it like if you saw

...