Scientists Create Paper Microscope That Costs Less Than $2

Discoveries involving a laboratory accident, venomous snails and a scientific instrument made of paper are some of the obscure, quirky or complicated advances honored Wednesday with awards that celebrate research that has had a major, if unexpected, impact on society.

Three teams of scientists have won the 2022 Golden Goose Awards, an award organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for their research projects that have gone from “wait, what is this?” momentum to pioneering breakthroughs.

“The Golden Goose Award reminds us that potential discoveries can be hidden in every corner and illustrates the benefits of investing in basic research to drive innovation,” said Sudip S. Parikh, Executive Director of AAAS and Executive Editor of the Science family of journals. .

Here are this year’s award-winning findings, which illuminate the unpredictable path of science and the benefits of investing in research that may not immediately pay off.

The paper microscope that breaks the rules by shaking up science

More than a decade ago, Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash was in the Thai jungle on a field trip for his research on rabies when he came up with the idea for a cheap, easy-to-use microscope.

“I saw this $50,000 microscope in a jungle in the middle of nowhere, locked in a room. It was an ironic moment. I could see right away that it wasn’t the right tool,” said Prakash, associate professor and senior fellow at the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Why was this essential piece of scientific equipment that could help diagnose devastating diseases like malaria not in use? It was bulky and difficult to transport, required training to operate, and difficult to maintain. As delicate and expensive as the instrument was, even trained technicians can be nervous about using it, Prakash explained.

Prakash envisioned an inexpensive microscope that could be used by anyone anywhere, but powerful enough to see a single bacterium. Along with his colleague Jim Cybulski, Prakash created the Foldscope – a compact microscope made of paper and a single spherical lens.

“It took an immense amount of engineering. At that early stage, I was sitting next to labs with million dollar microscopes. We wanted to make a microscope at a price of $1.”

People initially found the idea a little silly, Prakash said, and getting funding for the work was a challenge.

Fast forward to 2022. The Foldscope isn’t as cheap as a dollar, but at a cost of $1.75 to make, it’s a tiny fraction of the price of most lab equipment.

The telescope’s final magnification is about 140x, powerful enough to see a malarial parasite in a cell. The instruments have been deployed around the world in a dizzying array of applications. Last year in India, Foldscope was used to identify a new type of cyanobacterium. The microscope also helped identify fake drugs, Prakash said.

Prakash said that Foldscope — and the broader premise of frugal science — has a bigger role to play in a world rife with disinformation: “I want to bring science into everyone’s hands. Make it more personal. We dissociate everyday life from the process of science”.

A parallel frenzy that transformed neuroscience

As scientists working in the Philippines in the 1970s, biochemists Baldomero Olivera and Lourdes Cruz, professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines Diliman, found it difficult to get the right supplies for DNA research.

“We had to find something to do that didn’t require fancy equipment because we didn’t have any,” Olivera, a distinguished professor at the University of Utah’s School of Biological Sciences, said in a video produced for the Golden Goose awards.

Olivera and Cruz created what they hoped would be a fruitful side project. Cone snails are common in the Philippines and have always fascinated Olivera, who collected shells as a child. The pair decided to research the nature of the venom the snails used to paralyze their tiny fish fangs.

The team found that the bioactive compounds in the venom were small proteins known as peptides. After moving to the United States and joining graduate students at the University of Utah, Michael McIntosh and the late Craig T. Clark, Olivera and Cruz discovered that some of the peptides in the venom reacted differently in mice than in mice. in fish and frogs.

In mammals, the compounds were found to be involved in the sensation of pain rather than muscle paralysis.

“There was this incredible gold mine of compounds,” McIntosh said in the video. He is now professor and research director of psychiatry at the University of Utah’s School of Biological Sciences.

Work on a type of compound in the venoms, known as an omega-conotoxin, led to the development of a potent pain reliever, ziconotide, commercially known as Prialt.

His work on conotoxins also transformed neuroscience. Other scientists are now exploring the possibility of using conotoxins to treat a wide range of ailments, including addiction, epilepsy and diabetes.

How a lab accident led to a way to correct vision

The most famous laboratory accident in the history of science, when mold contaminated one of Alexander Fleming’s Petri dishes, led to the discovery in 1928 of the first antibiotic—penicillin.

Much less well known is the laboratory accident that contributed to the development of LASIK, a laser procedure to correct vision problems including myopia and farsightedness. It’s a procedure that has allowed millions of people around the world to ditch their glasses for good.

In the early 1990s, Detao Du was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the laboratory of Gérard Mourou, a French physicist and professor. Morou, along with Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, developed an optical technique that produces short, intense laser pulses that can puncture precise points without causing damage to surrounding material.

This discovery earned Mourou and Strickland, a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

One night while working in the lab, Du accidentally lifted his glasses while aligning the mirrors of a femtosecond laser, then a very new type of laser that emitted an extremely short pulse of light. Du’s eyeball caught a stray beam.

“He came to my office very worried. He was afraid they would close the lab,” said Morou, who encouraged Du to see a doctor.

Du was treated by Ron Kurtz, then an internship medical student at the University of Michigan’s Kellogg Eye Center.

“When we dilated the eye, what I saw was a very small number of very precise burns, what we would call the retina right in the center of your retina,” Kurtz said in a video produced for the Golden Goose Awards. “I was curious what kind of laser this was.”

Convinced that it might have a medical application, Kurtz met with Morou’s team and ended up conducting research with Du, who quickly recovered from his injury. After a year, they presented their findings at an optics conference in Toronto in 1994.

There, they met and teamed up with a researcher who was already investigating lasers to correct vision named Tibor Juhasz, then a researcher at the University of California. In 1997, Kurtz and Juhasz founded IntraLase, a company that focused on commercializing the bladeless LASIK technique for corrective eye surgery.

Mourou said he never imagined his precision laser would have applications beyond physics. He also gave credit to the university’s leadership, which, while insisting on better safety protocols, did not close its lab as he feared. Instead, officials funded some of the research that led to the corrective eye surgery technique.

“It took an accident like this to make a new pitch,” said Mourou, who added that Du suffered no lasting effects from his injury.

Source: CNN Brasil

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