Stephen Quake is a physicist-turned-bioengineer with a strong interest in the dynamics of single molecules. This interest has led him to develop microfluidic chips, circuits of silicone pipes, valves and chambers. These devices are called "labs on a chip" because they allow for complex biology experiments to be conducted all within the space of a coin. The experiments often run better and require far fewere materials.

In early 2006, Quake established a foundry at Stanford for making these chips for other academic researchers.

Directions for puzzle
In this puzzle your job is to route the constituents of an experiment from one chamber to another in a, er... simplified version of a chip. For fun we will post (below) the names of alumni who successfully complete the puzzle and e-mail the secret word in the subject line to staff member Marge Kastner. She'll post the first 10 correct responders and every tenth right answerer after that.

You must have Flash installed to run this puzzle, which was designed by Scott Kim of Shufflebrain and programmed by Larry Doyle of Cyberiandesign.

All entries, listed here or not, will be entered in the "Alumni Permanent Record" and count towards Honorary Degrees in Puzzology next June. To check out the degree earners this year please see the Puzzology page.

"Winning" entries

    1) Julia Tse

    2) Viren Bhanot

    3) Kai Yu

    4) Michael Connors

    5) Mark Aragon

    6) Darin McGrew

    7) Richard Thill

  8) Jack Chou

    9) Allan Abbott

  10) Jeff Blohm

  20) Michael Murray

  30) Navid Yazdani

  40) Mike Harris

  50) Kevin Koehler

  60) Jeremy Kolenbrander

  70) Mark Perkins

  80) Anthony Vitale

  90) Jasna Ristic-Djurovic

100) Jupe Hale

110) Kenneth Newcomer

Do you want to try your hand at past puzzles? Go to our Archive page.