Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman "Stephen Quake: What can the DNA in your blood reveal about your health?" In our 100th episode, we meet the scientist who answered this question and revolutionized everything from detecting Down syndrome to cancer. In The Future of Everything’s 100th episode, bioengineer, physicist and inventor Stephen Quake recounts a personal experience. When Quake’s wife was pregnant with their first child, doctors performed a common but risky procedure known as an amniocentesis. Using a long needle, they pierced his wife’s uterus through her abdomen to grab a few cells from the amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus to test for genetic diseases and abnormalities. The child was fine, but to Quake and his wife the test felt like an invasion. So Quake, a renowned bioengineer and physicist at Stanford, decided to do something about it. He invented a blood test to replace amniocentesis. It turns out that a small percentage of the DNA floating around in every mother’s bloodstream come