>>Taylor Wilson: I've done a lot of work in
nuclear non-proliferation counterterrorism.
And one of the huge problems that we face
is that with a relatively small amount of
material, you can make a weapon that can cause
a tremendous amount of damage.
You can think of the attacks of 9/11 that
killed thousands of people would be magnified
by orders of magnitude if there had been a
nuclear weapon used in that similar area.
And so this is a huge problem.
Luckily, radioactive things, nuclear materials
are radioactive.
They give off certain radiation, and we can
detect that radiation.
The problem is the detectors we have right
now for detecting something like weapons-grade
plutonium use this really rare isotope called
Helium-3, which we happen to have a lot of
on the moon, but down on Earth we can only
find it in the pits of old nuclear weapons
where we suck it out from the decay of tritium,
and so these detection systems, if they work,
are way too expensive and can't be kind of
mass produced like we need to create a net
for nuclear terrorism.
And so I developed a detector that essentially
replaces the Helium-3 with water, which is
the most ubiquitous, inexpensive substance
on planet Earth.
At least that's the active detection medium.
There's a few special tricks and a few special
ingredients in there.
But now you can, for orders of magnitude less,
build actually detectors that are more sensitive
than the preexisting systems.
So that's one of the things I did.
I also just decided that I wanted to develop
a technology to produce medical isotopes very
inexpensively because nuclear medicine is
one of the best tools we have right now for
treating and diagnosing disease.
PET scans are primarily where this is focused,
which is the best way to image cancer.
It's actually molecular imaging.
Instead of just seeing what's there, you can
actually see what's going on.
You can track biomarkers, biologically relevant
molecules.
The problem is these isotopes are very short-lived.
You can't inject something in the body that's
radioactive for very long.
And because of that, you can't stockpile them.
So instead of these, about an $8 million device,
that are currently used to produce these isotopes,
I developed a system that costs less than
a hundred thousand dollars, wheels into the
hospital room, and produces isotopes in similar
quantities on-site in the hospital.
