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Timeline of Molecular Reality Corporation

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From Molecupedia, the encyclopedia of very small things
Chronology of an American nanopore instrument company
For a narrative account, see History of Molecular Reality Corporation.

This is a timeline of Molecular Reality Corporation, the American nanopore instrument company that Kent Kemmish and Charles Gaillard founded in 2018 as demonpore, inc. It runs from Kemmish's student years to October 25, 2026, the day work began on Molecupedia. Where possible, dates come from public records such as domain registrations and patent filings. The rest come from the commit logs of the company's code repositories and from its own posts and records. For the story told in prose, see History of Molecular Reality Corporation; for the company itself, see Molecular Reality Corporation.

Before demonpore (2003 to 2013)

Kemmish trained in molecular biology in Arizona. From 2009 to 2012 he was on the founding team of a company that tried to read DNA with an electron microscope, and in its last year he had the idea that became the company.

DateEvent
2003 to 2008Kemmish studies at the University of Arizona, where he does undergraduate research on integrin signaling in fruit flies at the Arizona Cancer Center.[1]
2009Rejuvenation Research publishes "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality", a paper from the LysoSENS project at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, with Kemmish among its authors.[2]
2009Kemmish joins the founding team of Halcyon Molecular in Redwood City, California, which is developing DNA sequencing by electron microscopy.[1]
Fall 2009Kemmish writes the winning application for a Grand Opportunity grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute. The formal recipient is George Church's laboratory at Harvard Medical School; Halcyon is the principal sub-grantee.[1]
2012Kemmish first thinks of mechanical nanopores, pores whose opening can be changed by moving solid parts. His time at Halcyon ends the same year.[3][1]
2012In the company's later fiction, Keltar's "femtotech-felt form first bridged the dimensional divide to commune with our founder Kent Kemmishtree".[4]
July 2013PLoS ONE publishes the Molecular Threading paper, which describes stretching single DNA molecules out of a droplet and laying them down dry. Kemmish is among the authors and George Church is the last.[5]
2013In the fiction, Kemmishtree and Keltar found the Church of Sequence Space.[3]

The project (2014 to 2017)

Keltar sitting small in front of a carved orange peacock sculpture with a fan of green and teal stained-glass feathers.
Keltar, the company's mascot, in front of a carved peacock with stained-glass feathers. In the company's fiction he met Kemmish in 2012; his domain was registered in 2024.

Before it was a company, demonpore was a name with a domain and a slide deck. Its first experiments were done while the team lived in a van, and one of its early videos was recorded in a basement.

DateEvent
December 24, 2014The domain demonpore.com is registered on Christmas Eve.[6]
About 2015The project's first slide deck explains its name with cartoons of Maxwell's demon, after the design reminded a colleague of "those little cartoons". A 2026 post dates the deck to "several thousand years ago in AEST (Accelerationist-Equivalent-Subjective-Time), i.e., around 2015."[7]
2015 to 2016The first sliding occlusion measurements are read on a benchtop picoammeter. A video of them is titled "best pore data yet".[3][8]
2015 to 2017The team is, in the company's words, "literally living in a van".[3]
March 2017Kemmish records a video titled "nanotech history, in my mom's basement, March 2017".[9]
May 9, 2017Priority date of the patent application "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof".[10]

demonpore, inc. (2018 to 2020)

In its first three years the company filed its patent and recorded its best early data. It also put blood through one of its pores for the first time and built a prototype styled as a game console.

DateEvent
2018Kent Kemmish and Charles Gaillard incorporate demonpore, inc., a Delaware corporation. Its office is on Edison Way in Menlo Park, California, and the company describes its founding team as including alumni of Synthego, Oxford Nanopore and the Harvard Nanopore Group.[3][11]
2018Kemmish asks a machine-learning specialist to survey nanopore signal processing and is told that "none of the best work at that time was yet making use of frontier capabilities".[12]
2018Two colleagues record "the best single afternoon of collecting data we ever achieved early on at demonpore, inc." on a 200 nm silicon pore drilled with a focused ion beam. Kemmish is elsewhere, "probably trying to raise money".[11]
May 9, 2018The patent application is filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office as application 15/975,764.[10]
November 15, 2018The application is published as US 2018/0328909.[10]
Late 2018With "most of teamonpore in the room", Kemmish puts blood through a demonpore for the first time: "I grabbed a razor blade and bled into the flow cell." The next day the setup becomes a microparticle turnstile.[13]
December 2018Recordings of autonomous pore declogging.[3]
January 2019Gating and oversampling of individual cells and nanoparticles.[3]
February 2019Mechanical cleavage of DNA ropes.[3]
February 2019UPMC Enterprises becomes the company's institutional seed investor.[3]
February 19, 2019A video records "fields of dna molecules at 100x".[14]
2019Another recording from the year is titled "Demonpore2019 540p".[15]
2019Rumors reach Kemmish that another group has sequenced DNA with a solid-state pore. In his later word, the rumor was "a nothingburger".[16]
January 2020"We saw covid coming," Kemmish later writes. The company tries to launch the Molecular Aquarium, a chip on which a sliding aperture selects one pore at a time.[17]
2020Pore arrays for the Molecular Aquarium are made with a Silicon Valley microfabrication company, using a modified deep reactive-ion etching process. Members who help receive a CoronaPore badge.[18][3]
2020 to 2021The demonpore 64 prototype is built, with "the general appearance and footprint of a classic 1980s gaming console" and a joystick. An outside electronics designer builds its core electronics.[16][19]
2020 to 2021Knots tied in a nylon filament are pulled through a 2 mm hole and "sequenced" by the current. The first molecular game, Spyke Hunter, is coded.[19]

Molecular Reality (2021 to 2025)

After the patent was granted the company changed its name and wrote down its long-term goal. It built a volunteer community around a role-playing game, and in 2025 it let the patent lapse.

DateEvent
February 2, 2021US Patent 10,908,144 is granted.[10]
2021The company is renamed Molecular Reality Corporation. Kemmish later explains why the old name went: "you can't name a biotech startup after Maxwell's Demon in the age of Qanon."[3][20]
July 18, 2021The domain molecularreality.com is registered.[21]
2021A promotion saying "join our epic quest" builds the mailing list. In one sample of 135 sign-ups, the planned game "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!" beats "Raindrop Planet" by one vote.[3]
2021 to 2023The Burnerphone, a compact research unit that makes pores by controlled dielectric breakdown, is developed and later withdrawn from commercial plans.[3]
2022Kemmish writes "Our North Star: Utility-Scale Molecular Sensing" in one night. A memo, "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest", announces eight planned games, among them Poop of the Gods.[22][23]
December 2022A 14-page scientific and technical overview describes the demonpore 64, explains how a "small decentralized 'army of player scientists'" is to reach sequencing and universality, and reports a wait list of "around 800 people".[16]
2024The Molecular Streaming Services Corps, later the Molecular Streaming Corps, is founded. The company's knowledge base records: "M.S.S.C. was founded by Kemmishtree in 2024."[3]
August 23, 2024The domain keltar.ai is registered.[24]
November 2024One version of Keltar's chatbot instructions requires answers "WITH THREE RHYMING COUPLETS IN IAMBIC PENTAMETER".[3]
February 2, 2025US Patent 10,908,144 lapses for non-payment of a maintenance fee.[10]
March 29, 2025The domain epicquest.bio is registered.[25]
April 2025The game Epic Quest Biotechnology is renamed Epic Quest Bio.[3]
2025Company materials describe the handheld MR1 Molecular Streaming Device, "a portable device about the size of a large smartphone", with "an initial batch of around 50 units planned" and a 3D-printed case offered in "various colors including lapis lazuli".[3]
2025 to 2026A Conformer neural network reads DNA barcodes from a published dataset with 85.4 percent accuracy, against 81.0 percent for a retrained QuipuNet network. The result is unpublished.[3][26]
November 11, 2025First commit, titled "first commit", in the repository that becomes the MR1 Nanopore Reader.[27]
December 7, 2025The company posts a video titled "Church of Sequence Space invite Dec 7th 2025".[28]
December 23, 2025Commit: "Add Sentinel Nanopore Reader Rev 11 SCAD file".[29]

2026

In 2026 the company opened its operating system to members and began streaming from its bench to the public. In October it published the design of its own reader, which it had not yet built.

DateEvent
January 10Date of the banner file for the company's hexagonal MR logo.[3]
February 23Maxine receives a chatbot prompt that describes her as "the friendly, highly energetic, fast-talking cartoon representation of a Maxwell's Demon".[3]
February 26The home page reads "MOLECULAR STREAMING FOR LIFE".[3]
March 17 to April 24Kemmish records broadcasts for Radio KENT.[3]
March 28EQBio-OS opens with a welcome from Kemmish: "You're looking at the operating system of a real-life biotech startup, Molecular Reality Corporation."[30]
March 28 to 29Kemmish and the company's personas post more than twenty messages, among them "rain of blood", "Focused Ion Beam pore" and "Flossing with DNA". The persona Jeanne d'Arc shares "234 answers by real humans" to a question about what excites them, and a message is headed "Zeptoliter is My Favorite Unit of Measurement".[13][11][20][31][32]
April 10Calendar event: "LATE NIGHT SAVE THE WORLD EMERGENCY BROADCAST".[3]
April 25Calendar event: "Saturday TELETHON". Kemmish thanks members "for attending our sparsely attended meeting".[3][33]
MayThe instructions for the company's chatbot state: "We are not ready to ship MR series Molecular Streaming Devices".[3]
May 2Calendar event: "May Day All Hands Meeting".[3]
May 7In the evening, an EDR4 amplifier and a flow cell in Arizona are connected for the first end-to-end live streaming test. A commit the same day reads "Remember to add all the maxine files."[3][34][35]
May 18Calendar event: "Epic Jamboree!"[3]
June 13The live stream becomes the site's front page, and the operating system moves to an address of its own. Another commit gives Keltar an "enhanced Keltar page".[36][37]
JulyThe July of Streaming campaign calls for "one hundred hours of molecular streaming across the month of July". An earlier version of the plan had promised "100 hours of molecular streaming in 100 days".[38][3]
AugustKeltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality is published. It answers 35 questions in seven sections; in it Keltar calls himself "a puppet with a processor", and the stream archive holds "eighteen recorded streams".[38]
August 18An "ultraminimalist splash with email-code contact form" becomes the front page.[39]
August 19The front page is rebuilt around the line "everybody's racing to build the brain, we're building the eye."[40]
October 15A commit to the reader's repository "Adds AGPLv3 license to all relevant source files and root directory".[41]
October 16Version 1.0.0 of the MR1 Nanopore Reader design is released under the GNU Affero General Public License. The company's status line for it reads "Designed. Simulated. Built and measured: not yet."[27][42]
October 18Commit: "refactor: Rename Daemon Pore/Sentinel to MR1 across codebase".[43]
October 21A commit to the reader's repository, "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)", places the whole project in the public domain, five days after the AGPL release.[44]
October 25Work begins on Molecupedia.[3]

Changes of name

The company and its projects have been renamed often. Kemmish wrote of one early game that "Maybe I don't always give things the best names?"[19]

Changes of name, 2021 to 2026
Date Former name New name What it is
2021 demonpore, inc. Molecular Reality Corporation The company[3]
2021 to 2022 "Dragon Tyrant Must Die!" "Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant" A planned game[3][23]
2022 to 2026 "2021: A SARS Odyssey" "SARS Invaders" A planned game, renamed because "we didn't ship in 2021"[3]
2025 to 2026 Molecular Streaming Services Corps Molecular Streaming Corps The volunteer community[3]
April 2025 Epic Quest Biotechnology Epic Quest Bio The game that runs the company[3]
October 18, 2026 Sentinel Nanopore Reader; Daemon Pore MR1 Nanopore Reader The open instrument design, now the second device called MR1[43][45]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d "Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr." Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.
  2. ^ "Medical bioremediation: a concept moving toward reality". Rejuvenation Research 12 (6): 411. 2009. doi:10.1089/rej.2009.0917.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
  4. ^ "Keltar: Interdimensional Advisor to the Molecular Streaming Corps". Molecular Reality Corporation. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  5. ^ "Molecular Threading: Mechanical Extraction, Stretching and Placement of DNA Molecules from a Liquid-Air Interface". PLoS ONE 8 (7): e69058. 2013. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069058.
  6. ^ "WHOIS record for demonpore.com". Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  7. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Welcome to my Minds". EQBio-OS.
  8. ^ best pore data yet (Video). Epic Quest Bio.
  9. ^ nanotech history, in my mom's basement, March 2017 (Video). Epic Quest Bio.
  10. ^ a b c d e "US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof". Google Patents. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  11. ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Focused Ion Beam pore". EQBio-OS.
  12. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Mambapore". EQBio-OS.
  13. ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "rain of blood". EQBio-OS.
  14. ^ 2019 02 19 17 20 38 fields of dna molecules at 100x (Video). Epic Quest Bio. February 19, 2019.
  15. ^ Demonpore2019 540p (Video). Epic Quest Bio.
  16. ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.
  17. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "(no subject)". EQBio-OS.
  18. ^ Quartermaster (March 29, 2026). "The Line". EQBio-OS.
  19. ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
  20. ^ a b Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Flossing with DNA". EQBio-OS.
  21. ^ "WHOIS record for molecularreality.com". Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  22. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "Big Picture". EQBio-OS.
  23. ^ a b "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
  24. ^ "WHOIS record for keltar.ai". Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  25. ^ "RDAP record for epicquest.bio". Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  26. ^ "QuipuNet: convolutional neural network for single-molecule nanopore sensing". Nano Letters 18 (6): 4040. 2018. doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b01709.
  27. ^ a b "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.
  28. ^ Church of Sequence Space invite Dec 7th 2025 (Video). Epic Quest Bio. December 7, 2025.
  29. ^ "Add Sentinel Nanopore Reader Rev 11 SCAD file" (commit aa0cc1b). EpicQuestBio/MR1. December 23, 2025.
  30. ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "welcome". EQBio-OS.
  31. ^ Jeanne d'Arc (March 29, 2026). "Ecrasez l'infame!" EQBio-OS.
  32. ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Zeptoliter Nanobridge". EQBio-OS.
  33. ^ Kemmishtree (April 25, 2026). "FWI will be W". EQBio-OS.
  34. ^ Dot Kimberley (May 12, 2026). "Local Bench Streams Salt Water to the World". The Coulter Courier.
  35. ^ "Remember to add all the maxine files." (commit eb29986). epicquest.bio web application. May 7, 2026.
  36. ^ "Phase 4: route restructure" (commit efa0d22). epicquest.bio web application. June 13, 2026.
  37. ^ "Phase 5: enhanced Keltar page at /keltar" (commit 181e0ed). epicquest.bio web application. June 13, 2026.
  38. ^ a b "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
  39. ^ "Add unified ultraminimalist splash with email-code contact form" (commit 8b18293). epicquest.bio web application. August 18, 2026.
  40. ^ "Molecular Reality Corporation". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 19, 2026.
  41. ^ "chore: prepare repository for open-source release" (commit 676c499). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 15, 2026.
  42. ^ Dev Okonkwo-Hale (October 17, 2026). "Molecular Reality Open-Sources a Nanopore Reader It Has Not Built Yet". The Picoampere.
  43. ^ a b "refactor: Rename Daemon Pore/Sentinel to MR1 across codebase" (commit 2c06333). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 18, 2026.
  44. ^ "Relicense project to Public Domain under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)" (commit a52fc0b). EpicQuestBio/MR1. October 21, 2026.
  45. ^ Ferris Calloway (October 23, 2026). "There Are Two MR1s and That Is Fine". Debye Length.
Retrieved from "https://molecularreality.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Molecular_Reality_Corporation"
Last edited 3 hours ago by Translocation event