A Lego look-alike and a chemist’s wine pastime

Illumina’s illusion

Many of those attending the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress in Barcelona this September walked right past another seemingly typical Illumina booth. The company showcased the top-of-the-line fridge-size NovaSeq X sequencer, complete with a touch screen, a keyboard, and removable flow cells that attendees could stop by and mess with as they made their way across the exposition floor.

The catch was that it wasn’t a real sequencer. “We’ve had to tell people that it’s made from Lego,” says Kristina Coulman-Cook, senior marketing programs manager at Illumina, of the promotional exhibition piece.

Once the sculpture’s doors open, the illusion disappears: viewers inspect the reagent containers and find the characteristic Lego studs dotting their surfaces. Coulman-Cook tells Newscripts that the model has a false bottom that allows the whole assembly to be loaded onto a pallet truck and hauled from event to event. “It is still quite heavy, but not as heavy as our main instrument,” she says.

This Newscriptster was bummed to find out that Illumina marketing staff don’t take the model apart and put it back together at each expo, but it makes sense given that five artists at Sensational Bricks, a custom Lego model studio, needed a total of 928 h and just under 200,000 Lego bricks to complete the sequencer dupe, which Illumina has transported to four events so far.

Conference goers will have to be strategic if they want to see the sculpture, as it currently travels only within Europe. Its next appearance will be at the Festival of Genomics and Biodata in London on Jan. 29, 2025.

Unfortunately for those who would rather just build their own Lego sequencer, Coulman-Cook says they never got a full instruction manual.

Vinification fascination

Gordon Gribble, a professor emeritus and an organic chemist at Dartmouth College, is eagerly awaiting his results—not a spectrum or a crystal structure, but his rank in this year’s American Wine Society amateur wine competition. Wine comes up often here at Newscripts. The column featured the world’s oldest wine and sea-aged wine last month. Gribble reached out to Newscripts seeking details about the former, and that’s how we learned that he’s been making wine for more than 40 years.

Gribble got into vinification when his brother started making his own wine and winning awards for it. “This is my little punk brother—who’s not a chemist, of course—and if he can do it, I can do it,” Gribble tells Newscripts. His brother gave up the hobby about a decade ago, but Gribble is still going strong.

He does an occasional titration to measure acid and sugar levels, but Gribble says his background in chemistry hasn’t given him much of an edge in competition. For any chemists interested in making white wine, Gribble warns that it’s especially vulnerable to oxidation because it lacks the tannins found in red varieties. Oxidizing the alcohol in wine generates tart acetic acid, “and that’s a no-no,” he says.

As for this year’s competition, Gribble says he received what seem like high scores and hopes to grow his collection of medals, but the American Wine Society still hasn’t released ranked results. “It’s always a crapshoot,” he says.

Please send comments and suggestions to newscripts@acs.org.