The story actually begins
on a field trip to Uganda.
I was visiting medical centers in the middle
of almost nowhere.
And surprisingly we found somebody using a
regular centrifuge as a very expensive doorstop.
Centrifuges are incredible tools to have.
They're actually essential to be able to diagnose
many numbers of diseases.
But if you don't have electricity,
you can't use them.
We needed to find something hand-powered that
could spin really, really fast.
And at that moment, my inspiration
turned to toys.
I just absolutely love toys.
Toys hide in them really
profound physical phenomena.
And we decided to look at
a broad range of spinning toys.
But none of them were as fast as possible.
Until we stumbled on what is called a whirligig.
It spun much faster than any other toys we
had tried -- and actually was almost matching
the electronic centrifuges that we
often use in the lab.
So you load a volume of blood into a little
tube, attach to the disc, and you can separate plasma.
Which also allows you to separate
parasites like malaria quickly without power.
Now, the bigger picture here is that sometimes
inspiration for big ideas comes from really
unexpected places.
