Zack Lynch is author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (St. Martin's Press, July 2009).
Exploring the impact that converging technologies will have in developing countries was Jim Hurd, NanoScience Exchange, and Sarah McCue, UNDP. Highlights as follows:
- Adoption in developing countries isn't always slow - Mobile phones in China went from 1 million users in 1997 to over 200 million by the end of 2001.
- The Grameen Bank + mobile phones = success - The ability of the Grameen Bank to lease a wireless mobile phone to poor women in a small town in places like rural India has been a huge success for everyone.
- By viewing knowledge as a global commodity, CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, is looking at new ways to create an always on network in all developing nations.
- No small task to develop microfluidic chips that can enable low-cost diagnostics under $1 - New micro-ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) tests being developed at Harvard could transform disease diagnostics throughout the developing world. The new chips only require 1 drop of blood, the chips are resusable, and the detection system is now down to $45.
Special thanks went out to following for contributing to this important on-going work in developing countries: Jerome Glenn, Claude Leglise, Tom Kalil, Chris Hurd, Raj Bawa and Anil Srivastava.