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Transcript excerpt · English
Transcriber: Translate TED Reviewer: Ivana Korom
Host: TED is always about lifting humanity,
and our next speaker is George Whitesides.
He's listed as the professor of chemistry at Harvard,
but any of you who have read his biography know, he's so much more.
You can start with the fact that he founded 12 companies,
that he has co-authored 950 scientific articles,
or the fact that he is listed on 50 patents.
But I think what he is going to talk about today
is similar to what Hugo talked about,
another way that the application of technology to today's problems
gives us all hope and optimism.
I'd like to introduce George Whitesides.
(Applause)
George Whitesides: I am a wonk.
Started my career at MIT, I was quite at home there.
And we are defined by a certain view of the world.
And I will illustrate this in a way
that's relevant to what I want to talk about.
A few years ago I spent my evening cleanin out my attic,
and lifted some heavy stuff.
In the middle of the night I woke up in agonized pain.
And I thought, well I've probably strained my back,
but I wanted to be a responsible adult,
so I went off to the local emergency room,
and I learned something very interesting,
which is that as a middle aged male,
if you walk into the emergency room
and say, "I think I might be having a heart attack,"
all the people behind the desk actually stand up and do something.
It's really impressive.
(Laughter)
So, very sharp needles were stuck into veins,
and electrodes were applied
and very fancy equipment did fantastic stuff
and - turns out I didn't.
But I have to say, I loved the experience,
because I'm a wonk, that's what I do.
And it was very sophisticated,
it would have been even more sophisticated
had I actually had a heart attack,
but it was also very, very expensive.
And imagine that you do the same thing in this environment,
and the story is much more complicated.
There, the problem is basically solved by either you die or you don't.
The problem that I want to talk with you about
is really the problem of:
How does one supply healthcare
in a world in which cost is everything?
How do you do that?
And the basic paradigm we want to suggest to you,
I want to suggest to you,
is one in which you say that in order to
treat disease you have to first know what you're treating -
that's diagnostics - and then you have to do something.
So, the program that we're involved in is something which we call
Diagnostics for All, or zero-cost diagnostics.
How do you provide medically relevant information
at as close as possible to zero cost? How do you do it?
There are a number of reasons
for doing this kind of thing, other than this,
and I want to return to one of these at the end.
Let me just give you two examples.
The rigors of military medicine
are not so dissimilar from the third world -
poor resources, a rigorous environment,
a series of problems in lightweight, and things of this kind -
and also not so different from the home healthcare
and diagnostic system world.
So, the technology that I want to talk about
is for the third world, for the developing world,
but it has, I think, much broader application,
because information is so important in the healthcare system.
So what would have been the equivalent
of the laboratory that did the diagnosis in the Newton hospital?
And, you see two examples here.
One is a lab that is actually a fairly high-end laboratory in Africa.
The second is basically an entrepreneur
who is set up and doing who-knows-what in a table in a market.
I don't know what kind of healthcare is delivered there.
But it's not really what is probably most efficient.
What is our approach?
And the way in which one typically approaches
a problem of lowering cost,
starting from the perspective of the United States,
is to take our solution,
and then to try to cut cost out of it.
No matter how you do that,
you're not going to start with a 100,000-dollar instrument
and bring it down to no-cost. It isn't going to work.
So, the approach that we took was the other way around.
To ask, "What is the cheapest possible stuff
that you could make a diagnostic system out of,
and get useful information, add function?"
And what we've chosen is paper.
What you see here is a prototypic device.
It's about a centimeter on the side.
It's about the size of a fingernail, I'll show you a picture in a moment.
The lines around the edges are a polymer.
It's made of paper
and paper, of course, wicks fluid,
as you know, paper, cloth - drop wine on the tablecloth,
and the wine wicks all over everything.
Put it on your shirt, it ruins the shirt.
That's what a hydrophilic surface does.
So, in this device the idea is that you drip
the bottom end of it in a drop of,
in this case, urine.
The fluid wicks its way into those chambers at the top.
The brown color indicates the amount of glucose in the urine,
the blue color indicates the amount of protein in the urine.
And the combination of those two
is a first order shot at a number
of useful things that you want.
So, this is an example of a device made from a simple piece of paper.
Now, how simple can you make the production?
Why do we choose paper?
There's an example of the same thing on a finger,
showing you basically what it looks like.
One reason for using paper is that it's everywhere.