How do you start a research project that ends up receiving €4.27 million from the European Commission? It is not too dissimilar to a “normal” national research grant except that you also need to find international experts who are willing to participate. This project started at the University of Birmingham where three of the principal investigators (Fossey, Mueller, Sik) work. The latter two work in the same building and also hold a British Heart Foundation project together already. So, it is natural that they would talk about science questions, new opportunities, fascinating technologies and so on. During one of the chats Ferenc (Mueller) mentioned an article where Raman spectroscopy was used to see genetic materials in fixed (dead) cells. This is definitely his field: he knows everything about genes, transcriptions, and all the complicated processes that happen in cells. Attila knows a lot of small things in many fields, many are useless, and some are occasionally useful. His input here was some knowledge on Raman spectroscopy that he briefly used in an arts project to identify the age of Chinese cloisonné objects (ancient metalwork objects that have nothing to do with biology). On top of that he knew the funding members of the microscopy company Femtonics in Budapest, Hungary where he worked many (many, many… ) years ago. After the initial idea had bounced around for a while, it looked feasible that with stimulated Raman spectroscopy (SRS) the transcription (the first step of gene expression, in which a particular segment of DNA is copied into RNA) can be visualized in living cells. Since Attila is a neurobiologist, the obvious target of where to look at gene transcription was the brain. Because Ferenc works on zebrafish (little creatures that geneticists love due to their transparency) the project was formulated: investigate how genes are copied to RNA using SRS first in the zebrafish brain, then move to more complicated systems, such as mouse and human brains.