to just a few drops. i'll let her explain. >> people don't like big needles being stuck in their arms. and so part of our work has been -- >> reporter: so because they don't like that, they tend to not have their blood tested often enough? >> exactly. exactly. >> reporter: i mean, your basic thesis is that if we could have much more testing of blood, we would find out about these diseases or potential diseases much earlier. >> exactly. >> reporter: so why do we give so much blood? i think everyone who's ever had a blood test does wonder, why do you need so much blood to, you know, figure out your cholesterol or whatever it is? >> the whole system has been designed around that. so since really the 1960s when the clinical lab infrastructure began to develop, we've had this infrastructure that's very similar to what you see in mainframe computing where you have highly centralized, very big analytical instruments which require that much blood. and therefore, people have had to take tubes and tubes every