Saving Lives for 20 Cents | Manu Prakash | TEDxStanford

Buying and using quality medical devices can be the difference between diagnosing and curing an illness or disease, and death. Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash uses items such as paper, cheap children’s toys and string to create first a 50-cent microscope and now a 20-cent blood centrifuge. He isn’t stopping there. Manu Prakash is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He leads a curiosity driven research group in the field of physical biology and global health. A physicist and a prolific inventor, his inventions include a $1 origami paper microscope, a $5 chemistry lab, a 20-cent centrifuge, and a smartphone add-on for oral cancer diagnosis. Prakash has been distinguished as a Terman Fellow (2011-2013), a Pew Scholar (2013-2017), a top innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review (2014), a Brilliant 10 by Popular Science (2014), a MacArthur Fellow (2016), an HHMI-Gates Faculty Scholar (2016-2021) and a Chan Zuckerberg Investigator (2016-2021). This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx