The 50 Cent Microscope

The 50 cent Microscope

Microscopes. We’ve all used them at some point in our lives – school labs, experiments, viewing onion skin cells etc.

Typically, microscopes are devices that can range from a few hundred dollars to a couple million dollars. Agreed that the level of precision and degree of detail that these microscopes can offer would differ significantly, however the cost differential is substantial. In most parts around the world, we are able to walk into a doctors’ clinic and ask for a blood test, with results available within 15 minutes for an HIV test, to a few days for more complex tests.

Why is it then, that there are still sections of society in very underdeveloped places like Kenya, Uganda, Bangladesh and many places around the world that still have to wait months or sometimes years to be able to diagnose why they are sick?

When this question arose in my head, I started doing some research on the possible reasons why this might be the case, and came across lots of answers ranging from unskilled staff, lack of educated people to run these microscopes, too many people being sick in these under-developed nations. However, the one source that really stood out the most for me was a TED Talk done by Manu Prakash – A Stanford researcher and alumni, who extremely concisely describes this very problem and proposes a solution to it.

According to him, the answer to the lack of access and increased time taken to get results, lies in the microscope itself. These fantastic machines, despite being at the pinnacle of modern science and considered one of the greatest inventions in the world, research microscopes were never actually designed for field testing in the first place. These machines are often bulky, heavy, cost a lot of money and are often very hard to maintain. In his talk, he goes on to add how two of his students travelled to remote places in India and Thailand to research methods of medical aid available to people living there. Through their quests, they were appalled to find that there was fungus growing on microscopic lenses, some staff didn’t even know how to turn the microscope on, and a general sense of chaos and discomfort with using the microscope.

According to Prakash, what grew out of the trip was a ‘Foldscope’ – this is a completely functional microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization, projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding an A4 sheet of paper.

This foldscope is a single sheet of paper that has all the possible components to build a functional bright-field and fluorescence microscope. The paper has all the components that need to build the microscope, and is embedded with micro-optics at in the paper itself. Therefore, all that needs to be done is tab off the pieces, just like you would if you were building a 3D-Model, and assemble it into a fully functional, fully operational microscope.

What is absolutely phenomenal about this foldscope is that the piece of paper that is tabbed, has no instructions and no language on it whatsoever, it is all color coded – making it universally identifiable.  It is also interesting to note, that this microscope that is made out of paper actually has ALL the functionalities of a standard microscope – including the XY stage, a place where the sample slides can be inserted and the zoom in/out feature. Prakash and his team were very conscious of this in the design process as they did not want to reinvent the design of the microscope, given the fact that the standard has been optimized for many years, and it is this standard that all the technicians would have been trained on.