For these feats, he was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” last year-a coveted $625,000 award given to exceptional and innovative people. He has been working on tools for extracting malarial parasites from mosquito bites, and computers that run on water droplets.
He has also developed a skin patch that detects parasitic worms in the manner of an ultrasound, but for less than $10. Last year, I wrote about his Foldscope-a $1 pocket microscope that can be folded from a sheet of paper. Prakash, a biophysicist who grew up in India and now works at Stanford University, has a habit of creating devices like this. “I asked the students to bring more toys into the lab.” “This type of innovation has the potential to support the creation of cost-appropriate, rapid, and robust diagnostics that can be administered by local health care workers in the lowest-resource communities in the world,” says Carol Dahl, Executive Director of the Lemelson Foundation. And it’s actually much faster than a lot of desktop centrifuges, even though Prakash’s device is entirely hand-powered, weighs less than 2 grams, and can be made for just 20 cents. That’s more than enough to, say, separate cells or malaria parasites from blood samples. Modeled on an ancient children’s toy, and made with little more than paper, string, and tape, it can spin at speeds of up to 125,000 revolutions per minute (rpm). It was clear that we needed a centrifuge that could operate without electric power.” I’ve seen this play out over and over again. “The other eight required centrifugation. “On a chart, they listed all the tests that they do, but they were only really doing two out of 10,” recalls Prakash. It’s also why the clinic couldn’t carry out a lot of simple diagnostic tests. That’s why the one that Prakash visited had repurposed their centrifuge as a doorstop. They’re as essential to hospitals and laboratories as saucepans are to kitchens.īut centrifuges run on electricity, which is why many clinics in the developing world can’t use them, even if they can afford them. This process is used to separate out everything from cells to viruses to DNA, which means that centrifuges underpin a lot of modern science.
It was a centrifuge-a device that spins tubes of liquid at extremely high speeds, so that any particles within them sink to the bottom. In 2013, on a visit to a Ugandan clinic, Manu Prakash noticed a small metal machine propping open a door.