I had described the serial transfer experiment with one sample. Now of course... why taking only one sample? We take a foil and make ninety-six, a microtiter plate, it has ninety-six samples. And these can be handled by the amplification techniques. Now we have three metal blocks with the three different temperatures and we move it from block to block so we can... we don't need Q-beta enzyme any more, we can amplify with the method and we can watch again with a fluorescence or some glass fibre optics to it... now ninety-six parallel channels. And, you know, when you start this the students become inventive. Meanwhile we have 960-channel method there. That means already our glass fibre optics are about 3km of glass fibres, but you see a real technology is coming out of it.

[Q] Big, large technology.

Big technology, and that's what we had in mind from the beginning. As I say, many people now do work on evolutionary biotechnology, but it's a more pedestrian type of work than...

[Q] On a smaller scale.

Yes, on a smaller scale.  And once you are at a 1000-channel machine you're starting to think how could you improve that to 100,000 or a million, which means you get into nanotechnology. You get into sampling very small sample amounts, which means size of microlitre or so. And that, of course, requires a very new technology, and this is really our present main job, to develop suitable methods for this nanotechnology. What are the problems? You could say also: where are the limits? Well, the limit is to detect a single molecule. And this idea, can we get down to single molecules, I had about a few years ago, and then I was remembering that one previous co-worker, a post-doc of mine, really meanwhile had pioneered a technology which was suitable for doing such studies. And I must tell a little bit more about that because it's our present main experimental work we are doing.