“A young scientist who worked in the jungles of Thailand has been awarded a national prize for his invention of a $2 paper microscope that can be taken on field expeditions.
If a scientist wants to study something at the microscopic level, they need a microscope, which if they are deep in the Amazon Rainforest presents a serious problem.
Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash saw in his team’s $50,000 microscope a serious contradiction. As well as being bulky and ridiculously challenging to transport to remote locations, it needed training from skilled technicians to know how to use it. It also had to stay well out of the weather and other environmental impacts.
So he invented a portable one. Costing $1.75, the Foldscope has a 140x zoom, which is a small enough field to see a malaria parasite inside a cell…
“I want to bring science into everyone’s hands, make it more personal,” Prakash told CNN. “We have decoupled everyday life from the process of science.”
The ultimate in schoolhouse science, Prakash’s invention has sold 1.6 million units, mostly to schools in America, but serious scientists are also using it—like Dr. Kirti Nitnaware in India who works on the isolation and characterization of bioactive metabolites in cyanobacteria.
She used the Foldscope last year to isolate a new species of cyanobacteria. For this and other reasons, Prakash received the 2022 Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), parent company of the scientific journal, Science.
“The Golden Goose Award reminds us that potential discoveries could be hidden in every corner and illustrates the benefits of investing in basic research to propel innovation,” said Sudip S. Parikh, chief executive officer at AAAS.” -via Good News Network, 9/20/22
“Costing $1.75, the Foldscope has a 140x zoom, which is a small enough field to see a malaria parasite inside a cell.” The implications of this sentence alone are huge.
This news is a bit older, but it’s still super relevant for the ways that it will massively expand science and research capabilities around the world - especially for citizen science and in developing countries.
And this guy has also gone on to design another revolutionary kind of microscope that could change how we detect disease:
“Rapid diagnostic tests can quickly check whether someone has malaria, but they don’t count the number of parasites. That figure is important: It reveals the severity of an infection and informs treatment choices. To count parasites, you need trained technicians and good microscopes. “There’s incredible talent, but it’s limited by their tools,” Prakash says. “I would meet health-care workers who would save their salary for a year to buy a fancier microscope.”
So Prakash and his colleague Hongquan Li built a fancier microscope—a high-speed, malaria-detecting device that they’ve called Octopi. It can automatically scan entire blood-smeared slides for malaria parasites, using a neural network trained on more than 20,000 existing images. Octopi works off a phone charger. It analyzes slides at speeds that are 120 times faster than traditional microscopy. Weighing fewer than seven pounds, it’s portable. And at a do-it-yourself cost of $250 to $500, it’s cheaper than many basic microscopes or other automated slide-analyzing devices.
Prakash has spent his career building extremely cheap medical devices that can be used in some of the poorest parts of the world. Besides the Foldscope, he developed a $10 skin patch that can detect parasitic worms. And he developed a 20-cent, hand-powered centrifuge that can spin medical samples at up to 125,000 revolutions per minute, achieving what costly, bulky, and expensive machines can do using little more than paper, string, and tape.”
-via The Atlantic, August 22, 2019