The experiment’s setup, or rig, as Kuei Tseng calls it, looks like a cartoon version of something cobbled together by a mad scientist.
Clear plastic hoses snake from jars and containers down to two large, liquid-filled beakers on the floor and back up and around, ending in a tiny pipette poised at an angle under a high-powered microscope. It’s called a patch clamp, and it sounds like a backyard water fountain as it gurgles in the lab on the sixth floor of a University of Illinois Chicago medical building on Wood Street.
