We look at the back, those are the egg sacks.
Dude!!!!
I was not kidding.
Oh my god.
So this might be...
I'm holding in my hand a microscope that is waterproof, stomp proof.
I put it together in 2 minutes and it costs 50 cents to make.
And in this hand I have a blood centrifuge
that spins 10 times faster than a 10,000 dollar centrifuge and it costs 18 cents.
Both of these were invented here at Stanford in the lab of a brilliant physicist, biologist, inventor named Manu Prakash,
with the goal to help improve the life of the world's poorest, through low cost, effective, scalable inventions.
Incredibly it's believed that of the estimated 100 billion people to have lived on this planet,
More than half have died of malaria.
The symptoms are similar to the flu, and so the goal standard for diagnoses is to take a drop of blood,
spin it in a centrifuge and then look at under a microscope.
Historically, this has been really hard to do in the places that need it the most,
because the equipment can cost tens of thousands of dollars and it needs electricity
These two inventions can diagnose malaria, cost less than a dollar and require no electricity.
Manu, good to finally meet you.
Absolutely
You're like a superhero
Oh I don't know about that.
From an engineering perspective what you do is amazing.
Now before I continue with Manu,
let me just support that statement by showing how this 50 cent paper microscope actually works.
So it comes like this and you pop out the pieces of paper,
and follow the simple instructions like folding origami.
The lens is actually a tiny sphere of glass embedded in this plastic.
Then you put your slide in here,
and then you look through that tiny glass sphere and it's magnified 140x.
You can even put your phone up to it and film and then capture a video like this.
Your lab at Stanford, what do you do? What's your missions? Like the high level.
I grew up in India and one of the things I've always enjoyed is
getting exposed to scientific tools.
When I started the lab it was very clear that we have this hunger for scientific tools that's missing.
And so we spent almost 50% of our time building and designing scientific tools,
under the umbrella of "frugal science"
It can't cost a ton of money because every zero that you add
to a scientific movement probably hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of people cut off.
I wanted to test drive this paper microscope so we got a scoop of seemingly clear water from this pond,
and there was one tiny white spec that didn't settle to the bottom of our bag.
So Manu suggested that we take a closer look.
They can sense suction.
Ah, okay.
And they run away.
It's kind of like a fly when you'r trying to swat it, it senses your hand before it comes.
And that's what's actually happening, it realizes -you know- just like it's about to go in a mouth of a fish.
It runs away, but I think I'm gonna get it.
Got it.
There it is.
LAUGHS
Okay
Oh there he is.
He's in this one.
And remember, to the naked eye you can barely see this tiny
white spec.
Woah!
That's the single eye, you see that?
That little spot right there, and then we look
And then we look at the back
those are the egg sacks.
Dude!!
I was not kidding, so this might be 10-15 eggs on each side.
Those are antenna.
So when I said when I was sucking it in and it ran away.
It senses the pressure variation through those.
That's so crazy
You know this reminds me of like the first
time I saw the stars with the telescope.
Right? So you can see the stars all the
time and you see the pictures of the
stars but until you actually see it
yourself in a telescope it's just
like something shifts inside you and I
feel like we're doing the same thing but
just the other way.
I think that's such a beautiful analogy.
So with this 50 cent paper microscope you can actually see
any malaria in your blood. We generally
think of blood as a red liquid but it's
actually full of particles like red blood
cells, white blood cells and platelets.
So the problem is in just a couple drops of
blood you have a billion red blood cells.
So becomes the needle in a haystack,
trying to find a few that have malaria. So
that's where centrifuge comes in.
So you take some blood and put it in a tube and particles
will be all mixed up like this, but when
you spin it around really fast for a
couple minutes
the centrifugal force pushes all the
heaviest particles to the outside and
they displace the less dense particles
towards the middle. So when you stop, all
the particles are neatly organized from
the most dense at the edge to the least dense
in the center and since the malaria
effected red blood cell is slightly less
dense than a healthy one, you'll always
find it in between the healthy red blood
cells and the clear plasma. All that's to
say centrifuges are really critical
So I went to the lab to talk to Manu's colleague Saad.
to see how they apply their
frugal science philosophy to this
typically really expensive piece of
equipment.
These are traditional centrifuges. These
require electricity and you can see how
massive that is.
Imagine if you have to carry this on
your back if you're in a resource-limited
setting in India, for example, where I
grew up. And so if you want to do this, you
can't use something like this which costs
thousands of dollars and requires
electricity, and so while we were out
there we had a Foldscope but you
couldn't just take blood or urine or
stool and do it. That became the bottlenecking.
For the design problem statement
that you come up with is I want something
probably less than a dollar, preferably
made out of lightweight materials like
paper so it is easy to carry in your pocket,
it should match the speed of these devices.
You think about different gears and
mechanisms and you go into your kitchen
and your backyard and start thinking
about toys, toys are a great way. So we started
looking at yo-yos egg beaters and others
have thought about salad spinners. What
we found in this whirligig toy
is that it's one of the
most efficient ways of converting your
energy into rotational energy and
that was the "aha" moment. Using
strings as actuation in the
middle rather than mechanical gears.
I was just trying this out as soon as I saw
that, in 10 seconds
you kind of know in the back of your
mind that this is something powerful
like, you know, it transitions beyond a toy
to something that has really important
applications in global health.
Let's recreate that moment. We're going to take
some blood and let's just spin it .
We should take your blood. All right, haha
So for spinning only for 10 seconds at
20,000 rpm you can see my blood was
already separating.
This is my own blood
I've never seen my blood at this level before.
All right, here we go
That is crazy!
So each one of those is a blood cell.
What I loved most about Manu and Saad is their childlike fascination
and curiosity about the world around them.
They're also incredibly observant,
looking for ways their engineering
talents might uniquely help or inspire
others.
It's a contagious optimism and it's
refreshing.
The two examples of this are
This is I am awake! Yes!
It's too early morning for me.
That's your alarm clock.
That is my alarm, yeah.
In an extreme case if it's 9am and I'm still not up.