Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash, PhD, has said that he wants to make high-tech science available to the developing world. This year, his “frugal science” approach has earned him considerable media attention, culminating in today’s announcement that he has been named one of Technology Review’s 35 innovators under 35 (Prakash is 34).
Prakash's busy year got its start in the spring, when a TED talk he had given about a 50 cent folding microscope was released. The microscope, called the Foldscope, folds like origami and is powerful enough to detect microbes and project the image on a wall or screen. Prakash later offered to give away 50,000 Foldscopes to people carrying out innovative projects around the world.
Soon after, Prakash won a competition to build a new science kit for kids, held by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public. His entry was a sophisticated chemistry kit built out of a music box. In a story I wrote, Prakash said, "I'd started thinking about this connection between science education and global health. The things that you make for kids to explore science are also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile.”
These accomplishments earned Prakash an invitation to the White House Makers Faire in June, where National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, had a chance to try the Foldscope. He wrote about the device in his blog, “Not only will Foldscope give healthcare workers around the globe better ways to detect, and thereby treat, disease, it will also place magnifying power within the reach of all the world’s students, enabling them to ask and answer a great many scientific questions.”
Technology Review described what made Prakash stand out:
Manu Prakash is determined to push down the cost of doing science. Expensive facilities, he says, limit knowledge and expertise to a privileged elite. So from his lab in Stanford’s bioengineering department, he’s producing instruments that enable people to undertake scientific explorations on the cheap.
Previously: Manu Prakash on how growing up in India influenced his interests as a Maker and entrepreneur, Dr. Prakash goes to Washington, The pied piper of cool science tools, Music box inspires a chemistry set for kids and scientists in developing countries and Free DIY microscope kits to citizen scientists with inspiring project ideas
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