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.