How Cheap Paper Microscopes Are Changing Lives
Biophysicist and National Geographic 2015 Emerging Explorer
Manu Prakash is on a mission to bring a microscope to every kid in the world. Made out of paper and costing around a dollar to make, these microscopes allow kids to explore their world from a new perspective, answering questions like, Do ants have fingers? They're also becoming important educational tools that teach kids about sanitation and malaria in the developing world.
Upcoming Events at National Geographic Live
The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.
Transcript
Information only becomes meaningful when you've had an
experience. How do you really bring that experience of science to people all
around the world? A big vision that we have is to bring a microscope into the
pocket of every single kid in the world.
Thank you so much. I want to talk about equity and I want to
talk about how do we turn everybody to be passionately curious about their
world. The challenge that we face is these two words up here. Information you
all know. People at Google, seen right there and many others invented the Internet
and thought about bringing that information to people. Information is very
cheap will very quickly be free, and it should be free. But experience is very
expensive and many of you know this. And from my context of what I define
Frugal Science is bringing this connection where information only becomes
meaningful when you've had an experience. How do you really bring that
experience of science to people all around the world? And actually see what we thought
was seemingly mundane to really discover what this world is all about. So, we
spent a lot of time really thinking about this context.
A big vision that we have is to bring a microscope into the
pocket of every single kid in the world. The types of tools that we make are about
scalability. It's about getting to places where these tools would never go. There
are roughly around two billion kids last time I counted. Imagine this, there
are only eight hundred million bicycles on this planet. We used to think
everybody should have a bicycle. So, it's a very hard challenge to reach to
bring actual tools of discovery to people around the world. I love this
photograph because those are actually the parents who are enjoying the tool
much more than the kid trying to clamor it. And that's exactly what you want. Because
you want that kid, all, inside all of us to actually be exploring.
I travel a lot, we do a lot of field work from a context of
global health we try to take our ideas out in the field. This is what a normal school
looks like. This is the average school, see how clean-- there's absolutely
nothing to actually get inspired by. This is what a hospital looks like. This
is from our trip in Ghana where the doctor shows up once a week in a van. Hopefully
sometimes you'll actually get to see him. We need to change the paradigm in how
do you really bring tools into communities like this.
This is a single photograph that I took that pains me the
most. I was in Tororo we were working on a field site there to track mosquitoes
and I played with these kids for almost 15 minutes and I was walking by and I
turned around just out of a whim pulled out my iPhone and took this picture. And
my translator told me, “Do you know the kids that you were playing with where--
what they are sitting on? That's actually the graveyard that's the tombstone of
their brothers.” And there is an expectant mother sitting right behind and both
of those kids died of malaria. People bury their dear ones right in their front
yard, so you don't forget. I don't have to tell to this audience what an
unimaginable impact infectious diseases have stuff that we know how to cure. And
it's that what pains me in starting to think about how are we going to ever
bring change at a very large scale.
There is bright sides of the story. Here is a man who spent four
years of his life training to be a lab technician. He knows almost all of
microbiology for a lab-technician. He can grow organisms I can't grow. He spent
four years and his personal money learning microscopy and he gets shipped into this
remote site in Ngorongoro. I tell him, “Show me your lab. You're a lab
technician.” He says, “This is my lab.” You see the two beds? When they are not
occupied that's his lab. So, that's the challenge that we've kind of asked
ourselves is what are the types of tools we're going to build that gets into a
backpack of people like him who are going to be the change, if they are going
to think about taking some of these challenges on?
I'll show you the evolution of microscopes. This is a, kind
of a video that I like because imagine the craftsmanship that goes on into
building scientific tools. You know, you all make toys and you know what that
means. That's my favorite microscope, right there. So, the point being is that these
tools are designed they are great for research but not actually to be deployed in
every single person's pocket to be carried around. That's the question we started
thinking about. So, one of the context that we spend a lot of time is we
figured out a way to manufacture optics it's a very, very small scale. But then
we do robustness testing by throwing our microscopes and our research from the
third floor. It survives. One of the perspectives here is we do a lot of field
work out to be trying to build these tools and tailor them for infectious
diseases. This is some of the data that you get. That's traveler’s diarrhea out
there, malaria, that's individual bacteria. And one of the contexts that starts
to happen with something like this, as an academic there is a mind shift. So we
wrote this paper. It came out and we went to bed. And I thought the next day
the world's going to be different. Nothing changed. I was like, “Whoa... huh...
You write up an idea and nothing changes?” And it's that realization that we
have to take a step back.
We built inside our lab an actual production factory. And we
said we're going to make 50,000 instruments. If we are claiming that this is
something that can actually be done, let's do it. We spent months and months really
building robots that built every single one of these 50,000 instruments. I'm
carrying these around I have lots of demos I can show. But in the end, we
announced this program where we said anybody who poses a question and asks us a
question we're going to ship this instrument. It costs us around one dollar to make
this packet that we ship. We shipped 50,000 of these to 130 countries. It cost
me $ 25 to get a packet to South Sudan. But we do that primarily because it's
very important for us to get the tools in the broadest community of people. And
that's where-- when it hit us what we are actually trying to do. Which is
empowering this community to ask questions that are actually context dependent.
This is a girl that I met in Nigeria. And I showed her for the
very first time how mosquitoes actually feed blood. We found a fellow friend, there
was a mosquito biting him right there, we caught it we put it under our
microscope, and we actually showed blood cells inside the gut of that mosquito.
This girl had a completely different perspective. And the next day, when she
went back home she actually slept under a bed-net. That's the perception that
you want to change when you're trying to bring science and technology into
people's hands.
I could tell you stories after stories of kids trying to
detect fake currency. There is a pharmacist out there trying to detect fake
drugs. There are beekeepers around the world trying to and diagnose their bees
with mites. And the story goes on and on, and... in my entire career, I could
have never imagined these many problems sitting in my own little office. So
there is a very big lesson for something like that.
Here is another picture that I care about. This is a picture
of Maasai kids. And this is a very special school. This is with the Shine
Project where we're trying to teach sanitation to kids not by singing songs or
giving them some pamphlet that says 'washing hands is good'. But by actually
teaching them germ theory. And the fascinating thing about this picture and
this place is, out that window if you look this is your view. This inside the Ngorongoro
National Park. And the fascinating this is is if these kids want to study what
actually is inside lion poop they actually have access to that, I don't. I
can't ask that question.
So... I'm going to play this clip quickly. “Oh, my gosh! You
see a little bit of its face. Do you see the face?” This is a girl that came to
me asking, “Do ants have fingers?” And, I was like, “do ants have fingers... let's
find out.” And one of the context about that moment when you realize that there
is a world that's completely invisible to you that you are walking around right
now that can just become available at a moment's notice. So, one of the context
that starts to happen is I don't know when the next inspiration is going to
hit. So we have to build tools that are ready for that.
This is the website, go on this website to see what other
people are actually doing. This is actually a post from Panama of a kid who
found a glass fish and what you're going to see is single blood cells flowing right
through through the spinal cord of that fish. And, you know, I don't even know
the species... or has anybody observed this or not. So, this is what I want to
end with. I'm introducing you to the class of emerging explorers of the
microcosmos Many, many years from now. And I think that's the point is of
course, we can explore our own curiosities but are we investing time, money and
effort into making everybody passionately curious. Thank you.