In 1993 Lansbury showed that when he put a smidgen of beta-amyloid-42 into a mixed solution of free-floating amyloid particles, it immediately caused them to coalesceinto clumps.
"There has been an implicit assumption that if we just generated enough gene data it would coalesce magically into a complete understanding of cancer, " says H.
The upshot of those measurements was that droplets in the silver plumes are considerably smaller than the 14 microns that is the threshold for them to coalesce efficiently into raindrops.