About the dream of a Berlin "cell clinic" and the desire to treat diseases before they break out

Single-cell technologies were named "Breakthrough of the Year" by Science magazine in 2018: It is now possible to dissect organs, tumors, or even entire insect larvae into individual cells, measure their gene activity and, with the help of high-performance computers and artificial intelligence, reassemble the individual cell analyses into a whole organ or organism. "It's as if we invented a super microscope with which we could look into every cell in a tissue, into all the cells at once, and see what's going on molecularly in the cell – for example, when and why it gets sick," says Nikolaus Rajewsky.

Almost every cell contains the entire genetic material of the respective human being encoded in four letters that are strung together to form a book with billions of letters. As long as the cell is alive, it is busy reading the complex blueprints. Deciphering this reading of the "book of life" is the goal of the joint research initiative of the three research institutions Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charité, the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB) of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

German only | Ticket required