Really useful origami
An IIT Kanpur alumnus is energizing the world of invention with a `35 paper microscope
From all accounts, Manu Prakash loves to stomp on his most notable invention. In every story I have read or video I have seen about the Stanford University assistant professor, he is trying to crush underfoot a revolutionary, ultra-cheap paper microscope, when he is not trying to drown it or drop it from the third floor.
You get the point: Prakash, 34, who took his B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and PhD from MIT, has made a tough microscope, named the Foldscope, literally out of folded paper, glue and tape. Flat instead of upstanding—as we picture microscopes to be—the Foldscope is as good as many research microscopes, but it costs no more than ₹ 35, or about 50 cents. It weighs less than 9g, including its LED light source and battery, and takes less than 10 minutes to assemble from a sheet of pre-printed paper. It can detect deadly diseases, and it can spark fresh excitement in science at school and home. Nobel laureates have shown up at Prakash’s talks, during which the lanky bio-engineer, with his mop of curly hair, wry smile and scraggly beard, rarely fails to create a frisson of excitement.
There is something elemental about stripping science to its essentials, to reinvigorate the idea of small ideas and grand challenges. This has particular relevance to the emerging world, which struggles with not just ideas but implementation.
Would it be accurate, I ask Prakash, to say he wants science to be of mass benefit and generate excitement; more public statement than quiet, incremental advance? “That’s absolutely true,” says Prakash. “Science should not be driven by whether I am or not a scientist.”
This is why philanthropists and venture capitalists are attracted to frugal invention, building things that hold the promise of tackling big problems through simple ideas. Thus in March, the Moore Foundation, established by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, awarded Prakash’s laboratory ₹ 4.6 crore ($757,000) to build up to 50,000 Foldscopes for anyone interested in science. Thousands of applications have flooded in, from Manitoba to Mongolia.
Prakash’s method of what he calls use-and-throw-microscopy was developed after a $100,000 ( ₹ 600,000) grant in 2012 from the Grand Challenges Explorations run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Foldscope is inspired by Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. You can slip it into a pocket, and its cheap lens can magnify things up to 2,000 times, enough to manifest bacteria and parasites that cause a variety of diseases, including malaria and leishmaniasis. Every disease requires a different model of the Foldscope, of which there are more than 10.
Prakash’s ideas focus on scale. For instance, he believes that to tackle malaria effectively, it is vital to test every person the disease afflicts, which is about a billion people, every year. “So, that’s about a billion tests every year, and any platform you can imagine needs to scale to those numbers to make an impact,” Prakash explains in a Stanford video. That means a test that is almost for free, and that, he says, was the starting point for him and his co-inventor, George Korir, a graduate student at his lab.
Korir and Prakash share common aims: to create things useful to a large mass of people and spark excitement in science. In April, they also won the first prize of $50,000 from the Moore Foundation to reimagine the basic school chemistry set for the 21st century, to create a lifelong engagement with science, as it did for Moore himself.
Prakash and Korir’s winning entry smartly uses old and new technology, microfluidics—the science of replacing room-size experiments with beakers on a chip with droplets of chemicals, called laboratory on a chip—and computer punch cards from the 1960s. The new-age chemistry kit is hand-cranked, releasing through the holes in the punch cards 15 chemicals that a teacher or parent can fill on chips with an eye-dropper.
Invention appears to be in Prakash’s blood. When he was a nine-year-old schoolboy in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh (“You know, home of the Rampuri knife”), he tried to replicate in miniature an oil-tanker explosion at a school science fair. Prakash and the judges escaped injury.
This week, The New York Times reported how many years after the exploding oil tanker, when Prakash was studying engineering at IIT Kanpur, he cornered Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist and inundated him with ideas. “There were all these serious students, and then there was Manu,” Gershenfeld told the Times. “He had 10 different projects and 10 different ideas, and none of them made sense, and all were interesting.”
The Prakash Lab at Stanford is best known for the Foldscope, but it has other, unpublicized interests, such as probing living matter in a petri dish to discern how shape and form is computed—anything, as Prakash puts it, that “does not fit our current framework of thinking”.
Samar Halarnkar is a Bangalore-based journalist. This is a fortnightly column that explores the cutting edge of science and technology.
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First Published:1 May 2014, 06:36 PM IST
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