The Economist.
Sleveja Čankova, the Economist's healthcare correspondent,
recently visited a lab at the Welcome Sanger Institute, near Cambridge in England.
It's one of the world's leading genomic laboratories.
Can you see these little pieces of tissue?
So this is just the uppermost layer of the human esophagus which runs from the mouth to the stomach.
So that's the esophagus.
Looks like a piece of jelly.
Yes, it's actually slightly more solid than you would think.
You can have a go at picking it up.
Joanna Fowler is a researcher who's interested in the cells lining the human esophagus.
Do you want to have a go at cutting two millimetre of crude sample?
Yeah!
Slavaier was eventually drafted in by Joanna and her team to cut squares of tissue from the esophagus,
which were destined for genetic sequencing.
I'm going to give you this.
This is the blade, just be careful because it's sharp, obviously.
So you want to make a little tiny into one of those two millimetres,
so one of the squares of the chessboard.
This is very tricky.