Growing up on a farm in Australia, Liam Hall was a mechanic “getting greasy, scraped knuckles”, but in recent years his career has taken a more technical turn. He’s now the head of quantum biotechnology at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. “I’ve got a bit of a weird background. I always wanted to be a diesel mechanic. Doing that for a while led to wanting to do engineering at university.

That introduced me to the physics, and then to the quantum physics. A rollercoaster ride is a good way to describe it,” he says.His team has been developing diagnostic technologies, experimenting with micro sensors crafted from tiny slivers of diamonds about 50 nanometers in size (about 1,000 times finer than human hair) to test patients’ iron levels.

Current methods monitor a protein known as ferritin, the body’s iron storage mechanism. While monitoring ferritin is a good way to measure iron, it would be more accurate to measure the actual iron levels inside the protein….Story continues…