Photography: Jennifer Saul
David Profitt was a little confused when a developmental biologist walked into his engineering shop and asked if Profitt could make an automated embryo sorter using a Fax machine. "I thought, how can you sort embryos with a piece of telephone equipment?" he says.
As it turns out, the researcher meant FACS (fluorescence-activated cell sorter), not Fax. Profitt, an electrical engineer and head of the shop that serves the Stanford University School of Medicine, was no stranger to medical technology, but cell sorters were new for him. Nevertheless, he agreed to take on the project.
For Profitt, getting his homonyms straight would turn out to be the least of his challenges, and what was supposed to be a three-month project would become years of work. Yet such is life in machine and engineering shops around the world, where people with different backgrounds, vocabularies, skills, and working styles ...
