technology

Hope grows for new TB test

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(This article is part of a series of articles on tuberculosis that I wrote for the Summer 2008 issue of NYU Physician.)

To confirm that you have TB, the doctor will ask you to cough up at least a teaspoonful of phlegm, or sputum. You’ll have to come back to the hospital twice more to provide samples, and technicians will painstakingly culture the slow-growing bacteria from the sputum.
 A few weeks after that third visit — by which point you may have exposed others — the doctor should be able to tell you whether you have TB.

This crude sputum diagnostic test is 100 years old. “The situation is fairly horrendous,” says Dr. Suman Laal, Ph.D., associate professor of pathology and mircrobiology.

There are a
few expensive alternatives: fluorescent microscopy, automated culture systems, and tests for the bacterial DNA. But 90 percent of the disease is concentrated in the poorest parts of the world, where these options are not feasible.

Clinically, TB symptoms can be difficult to distinguish from those of
 other bacterial or fungal infections, pneumonia, or certain tumors. Diagnosis with X-rays is subjective and all but useless 
in people who are HIV-positive, and
 a commonly used skin test gives false positives in anyone who has been immunized with the BCG vaccine or 
has been infected with the TB bug’s bacterial cousins.

The ideal test for TB would be fast, cheap, and would deliver a simple Yes or No answer — much like a dipstick pregnancy test. But developing a test like that has proved challenging.

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Nanocosmetics: Buyer beware

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(The following article appeared in the March/April 2007 issue of Technology Review.)

There’s a lovely jar of night cream that’s been sitting on my dresser for a month. According to the salesperson who spent a half-hour on the phone with me extolling its virtues, the cream will dig up the gunk that’s clogging my pores, soak up excess oil, and “teach” my cells to make less of it.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Too bad I’m too scared to use it.

The cream, which cost me $163 for half an ounce, is made by New York City-based Bionova. The company’s website makes much of its “nano tech platform,” and explana­tions of its products feature incomprehensible phrases such as “restoration of the malfunctioning biological information transfer.” But details in plain English of how any of this would actually work are sketchy. And the sales­woman’s explanation was similarly cryptic. The cream, she informed me, has various “nano complexes” in an exact ratio that is customized for my age, my gender, and my face’s precise degree of oiliness–information gleaned from a number of probing questions she asked me.

How, I asked, did I know these tiny particles weren’t going to creep under my skin and wreak havoc with my body?

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Make anything, anywhere

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(I wrote this article for Nature in August 2006. I spent a day at the FabLab outside Johannesburg, South Africa, amazed in particular at the unusual projects that housewives dreamed up. I was also convinced I would never make it out of Johannesburg alive, but that’s a story for another day. You can download a pdf of this article.)

Can everyone use technology creatively? Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think so and have launched ‘Fab Labs’ around the world to prove it.

Valentina Kwofie, electronics pioneer

Neil Gershenfeld has been teaching a class called “How to make (almost) anything” to some of the brightest young adults in the United States for years. But it took an eight-year-old girl in a small village in Ghana to show that anyone, any- where, really can make just about anything.

One evening in June 2004 — the day after Gershenfeld had left Ghana having taught a week-long version of his class in the village — little Valentina Kwofie began cobbling together a circuit board.

Hours passed. Several times Kwofie’s par- ents stopped by the lab Gershenfeld had set up, imploring, “Valentina, let’s go home, let’s have dinner, let’s go to bed.” It was the first time any- one in the village, Takoradi, had made a circuit board: people crowded around, watching her nimble fingers manoeuvre parts half the size of a grain of rice. Finally, long past her bedtime, she crafted a board that worked.

Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hadn’t known what to expect when he put the fabrication laboratory, or ‘Fab Lab’, technology that he worked with at MIT into the context of rural Africa. What he got was inspiration. “This eight-year-old girl in Ghana was making microcontroller circuit boards for the love of it, for the joy of discovery,” he recalls. “That ordinary people can do it and want to do it was very surprising.”

The Fab Lab in which Kwofie made her circuit has been followed by others around the world, each equipped with the same key machines. Today, there are ten Fab Labs — above the Arctic Circle in Norway, in Costa Rica, India and South Africa — and within the next year, fifteen others are planned, of which five will be in Africa.

Together, these labs are showing that giving people the ability to make things for themselves can be the fastest way to solve their problems, particularly in communities with little access to education or technology.

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