Alum of IIT Kanpur is now a researcher at Stanford.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A team of researchers at Stanford University, led by Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Manu Prakash, has developed an incredibly low-cost microscope made almost entirely out of a very unlikely material – paper.
The microscope, dubbed The Foldscope because of its folding design, comes in three parts: a slip of paper which acts as the slide on which the specimen is kept, a slide for the ball-shaped lens, and a piece that contains an LED light, to help illuminate the subject being examined.
The Foldscope is used by putting all the pieces together and holding it up to the person’s eye, whereupon the slides are shifted with the person’s thumbs to move the subject around and control the lighting.
Prakash is hoping that the microscope’s size and inexpensiveness will make it widely used in areas where such technology is not readily available. Poorer regions of the world not only have a hard time gaining access to microscope technology, but also have the highest prevalence of viral and bacterial diseases, which microscopes can help fight against.
To get the word out, Prakash and his team have also created the Ten Thousand Microscope Project, which asks people from all over the world to submit their ideas for projects that could use a Foldscope. So far, about 8,000 people have signed up for the crowd-sourcing project, from about 25 different nations around the world.
“We have a very simple goal that every single kid in the world should grow up with a microscope,†Prakash said to The Stanford Daily. “We should all be carrying around microscopes in our pocket all the time.â€
The money to fund the entire Foldscope project came from a grant Prakash one last year, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Prakash received $100,000 on November 20, which was also to be used to help further his pursuits in finding new ways to detect and treat Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs); Prakash hopes that the Foldscope will help this.
Prakash is a 2002 graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where he majored in computer science and engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in 2008 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has had three scientific studies published by peer-review journals since 2007.