ALANO, ALDIN Z.

SE-4201

Saving billions of lives for 68 cents with simple engineering.

Prakash, who is 37 years old, was born in Mawana, a rural sugar-producing town
in Uttar Pradesh. He runs the Prakash Lab at Stanford University, a playground for
frenetic inventor prodigies across various disciplines, all engaged in “curiosity-driven
science”. They often work, Prakash says, without a set agenda, “working on
intuition…we don’t know whether something we are working on will ever be useful, but
we think there is something there”.
Prakash has a full head of curly hair and a scraggly, thick beard. He looks and
speaks like a folk troubadour: his sentences, steeped in old-world wisdom, reveal a
consistent engagement with grass-roots problems, and wonder at the natural world.
Prakash is leading what could be termed, without much exaggeration, a revolution in
scientific and medical research. It’s called “frugal science”, and it has a simple premise:
Is there a way to build scientific instruments and medical systems that are really, really
cheap? Can we then share them with everyone, particularly in resource-poor countries
with limited access to technology?
Prakash has infused this core value in the workings of his lab. Since the first
Foldscope was made, the laboratory has, in quick succession, created a device that allows
smartphones to scan for oral cancer; a method of identifying mosquito species by
recording the sound of their wingbeats with a mobile phone; and a “chip” that mosquitoes
mistake for human flesh and bite into, depositing their saliva on the chip, which is then
sampled for pathogens and DNA. This year, in another major breakthrough, they created
a centrifuge made of a paper disc and piece of string—called a “Paperfuge”—that can
reach up to 125,000 RPM (revolutions per minute) just by pulling on the string with your
hands, and can separate plasma from blood in under 2 minutes, just like a $10,000
centrifuge used by medical labs, spinning at around 16,000 RPM.
“The idea of frugal science is not about hacking something together quickly,”
says Prakash. “For each of our tools, there are 10-20 pages of math involved. We are
often trying to look at unknown principals.”
The story of how the Paperfuge came into being is a case in point. The Paperfuge
is basically a toy—one of mankind’s oldest, as it turns out—popularly called a whirligig.
You probably played with it when you were a child. You passed a thread through the
holes of a button and then held both ends of the thread and pulled, and the button spun in
the middle.

Foldscope Paperfuge