To encourage collaboration and hasten scientific advances, Raymond Stevens, director of the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, invited experts from a variety of fields — chemists, engineers, physicists and neurobiologists, among others — to a retreat on Santa Catalina Island. There, he challenged them to work together and propose projects bridging different fields and addressing intractable problems in bioscience. One proposal in particular stood out.