How to Mass Produce a $1 Origami Paper Microscope Meg Miller - Fast Company
go to original December 1, 2016

Foldscope in the Amazon Rainforest (Rainforest Expeditions)

In its two years of existence, the Foldscope - a super-cheap, origami paper microscope that can fit in your pocket - has made its way around the world, landing in some unusual markets. In the Peruvian Amazon, entomologist Aaron Pomerantz used the microscope in his fieldwork studying plant cells and insect larvae, without having to worry about the effects of mud splatters or rain on the instrument. In Tanzania, school kids used Foldscope to explore local water quality as a part of Project SHINE, a sanitation literacy project through the University of Calgary. It has also been used in India, Argentina, Mexico, and all over the United States, by everyone from groups wanting to detect fake drugs to kids examining the microbial quality of camel milk.

The diversity and breadth of Foldscope's initial users wasn't by accident: when Stanford University engineer Manu Prakash and his research students manufactured the first version of the microscope in 2014, they sent 50,000 of them to people in 135 countries to beta test. Now, Prakash and Jim Cybulski, a former PhD student in his lab, have expanded the Foldscope business outside of Stanford in hopes of getting the $1 paper microscope in the hands of a million more people over the course of 2017. Based on the usage and feedback of their wide pool of first users, they're offering updated and expanded kits via a Kickstarter campaign, which launched last week and has already tripled its goal.

Prakash says that the central idea behind the Foldscope has always been to make scientific tools as accessible to as many people as possible. "In some countries, people don’t believe in germ theory," he says. "Even in this country, there are people who don't believe evolution. But when you have tool that allows you to give a demonstration right in front of your eyes, it changes your perception because it's all about facts. The goal was to see: if we give tools to enable these passionate people, will they be able to transcribe that into progress?"

Read the rest at Fast Company

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