At Harvard University the book serves as a textbook and lab manual for a university laboratory course designed to intensify the intellectual experience of incoming undergraduates while exploring biology as a field of concentration. Nanopore sequencing is an ideal topic as a path to encourage students about the range of courses they will take in Biology by pre-emptively addressing the complaint about having to take a course in Physics or Maths while majoring in Biology. The book addresses this complaint by concretely demonstrating the range of topics — from electricity to biochemistry, protein structure, molecular engineering, and informatics — that a student will have to master in subsequent courses if he or she is to become a scientist who truly understands what his or her biology instrument is measuring when investigating biological phenomena.