The Hole Enchilada
"The Hole Enchilada" is a section of the essay with which Kent Kemmish introduced Epic Quest Bio, the role-playing game that is the management system of Molecular Reality Corporation. Written in 2025, it retells the invention of the Coulter counter in the second person, addressing Wallace H. Coulter and his brother Joseph in their Chicago basement in 1948, and ends with a complaint on Coulter's behalf: "Outrageously, you didn't win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for it."[1]
The documents agree with the essay on the basement, the year, the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, the needle and the motive. They add what the essay leaves out: the cigarettes were Joseph's, the hole was burned with a heated needle, the wrapper was held on with rubber bands, and patent attorneys told Coulter that he could not patent a hole.
Context
The essay was the landing text of epicquest.bio in 2025. Before the history, it lists "SOME POPULAR KNEEJERK REACTIONS" to its goal, among them "You sound like Theranos!", answered with a diagnosis of Theranos Derangement Syndrome, and "There is no technology that can do what you're saying!", answered with "Agreed!" The essay concedes that building the technology "will still take several years and thousands of caring creative nerds", and adds: "That's the whole enchilada! Or, rather..." The next heading is "THE HOLE ENCHILADA".[1]
Content
The section opens like a fable: "There was once an inventor named Wallace Coulter." A few years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it says, Coulter considered how to diagnose radiation sickness quickly in a large population by counting white blood cells and platelets. He had seen technicians count cells under a microscope, "one at a time, with a small handheld device they clicked to increment a mechanical counter", a process that "was a slog, and would obviously fail for a horde of survivors in desperate need of triage."
The essay then explains the Coulter principle in five steps: electrodes in salt water carry a current; an insulating barrier stops it; "if you then poke a tiny hole in the barrier, a tiny current flows again"; blood cells drawn through the hole each displace "its own volume of charge-carrying saltwater"; and an oscilloscope shows "blips as the current drops with each passing cell." The second person follows:
If you're Wallace Coulter and his brother Joseph in a makeshift lab in the basement of your home in Chicago in 1948, you're trying this for the first time in human history.
Kemmish, "THE HOLE ENCHILADA"
In the scene that follows, the reader tests a barrier of cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, makes the first hole with a needle, pricks a finger "maybe with the same needle", and watches the oscilloscope for "the first blip that tells you it's working like you imagined it would."
"Fast forward seventy-seven years," the section continues, and Coulter has "pioneered the most heavily used medical diagnostic test on the planet: the complete blood count (CBC)." After the Nobel complaint it adds that Coulter "merely established the basic technological concept by which Universal Molecular Streaming™ will lead to a world free from disease," and closes: "Let us now let Wallace Coulter and his brother Joseph rest in glory". The following section, "Journey to Angstromia", takes the story from Coulter's holes to protein pores.
Against the record
Most of the documents were collected by Marshall Don Graham, a former technical adviser to Coulter, who wrote a history of the principle and, in 2013, a paper titled "The Coulter principle: imaginary origins" that set the record against the versions then in circulation.[2][3]
| The essay | The record |
|---|---|
| Coulter set out to triage survivors of an atomic attack | Graham's account gives the same motive; Coulter's drafts for a Navy proposal speak of "an accurate, simple, and rapid means of obtaining red blood cell counts" in the event of atomic attack |
| He had watched technicians count cells by eye | From 1939 he sold and serviced X-ray equipment in the Far East and saw hospital technicians count cells on hemocytometers |
| A basement lab in Chicago in 1948 | The brothers bought a house in Chicago in April 1947 and experimented in its basement; their first attempts, in 1947, were optical |
| The barrier was "cellophane from a pack of cigarettes" | On October 16, 1948, Wallace used the cellophane wrapper from a pack of Joseph's cigarettes, bound to a glass tube with rubber bands |
| The hole came from "poking a needle through the cellophane" | He heated the tip of a sharpened needle and burned the hole |
| Blood from a pricked finger | His own blood, "greatly diluted" |
| "the first blip" on an oscilloscope | "It didn't hold up long," he said later, "but we were able to count some cells." Two weeks later a 76 µm hole in cellulose acetate gave pulses about 1 ms long on the oscilloscope |
| No Nobel Prize | No Nobel Prize; 85 US patents, the John Scott Medal (1960), the IEEE Morris E. Leeds Award (1980) and the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2004) |
The essay leaves out the patent.
Attorneys to whom Coulter explained the idea told him repeatedly: "You can't patent a hole." A patent attorney introduced by a former colleague understood it, and US patent 2,656,508 was granted on October 20, 1953.[3]
One statement in the essay goes further than the record. It says that almost all the instruments that perform the complete blood count "are still, essentially, Coulter Counters". Modern hematology analyzers measure cells by electrical impedance, by optical methods or by both, so the Coulter principle is one of their methods and not always the only one.
Title
The pun belongs to a family. The company's other uses of the hole include an atlas of nanopore laboratories called The Hole World, the "Holey Grail", and two lines in its guide for visitors: "The hole will wait for you." and "A hole this small is an object you build, then photograph, then hope."[4] A post on the company's member site makes the essay's Nobel complaint in seven words, "They should have won a Nobel prize."[5]
See also
References
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (2025). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.
- ^ Graham, M. D. (2013). "The Coulter principle: Imaginary origins". Cytometry Part A 83 (12): 1057-1061. doi:10.1002/cyto.a.22398.
- ^ a b M. D. Graham (November 18, 2020). "The Coulter Principle: For the Good of Humankind". University of Kentucky.
- ^ "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
- ^ Thucydides (March 29, 2026). "Bend it like Beckman Coulter". EQBio-OS.