Scientific Curiosity: Finding Sublime in the Mundane • iBiology

00:00:00:06 - I look at my own life and I ask myself
00:00:02:22 this question many a times, you know, why am I a scientist?
00:00:05:24 (bright music)
00:00:10:05 - So, my name is Manu Prakash,
00:00:12:05 I am an associate professor in the
00:00:13:22 Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University.
00:00:17:12 When we introduce science to people,
00:00:19:15 it's always done in a context that,
00:00:21:07 in the end, somebody's watching,
00:00:23:07 somebody's always grading you,
00:00:25:00 somebody's always looking over your shoulder,
00:00:27:13 are you doing the right thing?
00:00:29:21 And my introduction to science was
00:00:33:05 so informal that I didn't even know that was science.
00:00:38:24 Most of my childhood was in this small town called Rampur.
00:00:44:07 If you ever watch a Bollywood movie
00:00:45:21 they talk about this knife called Rampuri Chaku.
00:00:49:22 It used to be made only in that region in the country.
00:00:53:09 So I had this strange fascination
00:00:55:14 with manufacturing really early on,
00:00:58:03 and I think I was just very fortunate
00:01:01:05 that the house that we remembered living the most in
00:01:04:22 essentially had an abandoned lab.
00:01:07:21 There were cobwebs everywhere so
00:01:09:20 there was a sense of mystery to it.
00:01:12:02 I mean, I could be a telescope
00:01:13:13 or it could be a time machine, I had no idea.
00:01:17:07 We would play with the cows and the animals
00:01:19:09 very much in the same way we would play with
00:01:21:06 this sophisticated scientific instrument.
00:01:24:17 It was just an abandoned space with objects
00:01:27:05 that I could play with, and they were our toys
00:01:31:12 without really knowing what they meant.
00:01:34:19 And my brother and I spent three or four years
00:01:37:09 just really, both organizing that lab
00:01:40:04 and just doing things that I would,
00:01:42:08 from the current standard, describe were quite dangerous.
00:01:46:00 The very first thing I remember making
00:01:49:20 was this devil that, during a festival,
00:01:53:22 you essentially light up on fire.
00:01:56:16 We made these explosive boats to
00:01:59:18 depict how oil spills actually work.
00:02:02:20 You can see there's a fire theme in my childhood.
00:02:06:02 I think that's when I remember
00:02:07:19 I built my very first microscope,
00:02:10:14 and we didn't have a source of lenses
00:02:12:07 so I actually stole my brothers eyeglasses
00:02:15:23 and for a day or two he was really upset
00:02:18:04 because that was his only pair of eyeglasses.
00:02:21:20 And then I reached high school,
00:02:23:19 and the system works in a very specific way.
00:02:26:08 I mean, you know, in India tens of millions of kids
00:02:29:05 apply for these exams that you have to pass
00:02:32:01 before you could get into a good engineering school
00:02:34:21 or a good medical school.
00:02:36:19 And these exams were about books,
00:02:38:14 they were not about what I was making.
00:02:40:12 None of my experience counted,
00:02:43:02 and it was a complete U turn from my personality.
00:02:45:23 I was sitting on a chair for 16 hours a day
00:02:48:18 preparing for that exam, but the only way
00:02:51:19 that I survived was, those childhood days came back slowly
00:02:57:24 and, you know, most of what I do
00:02:59:15 in my lab now reflects back on that
00:03:02:00 open ended creativity and curiosity.
00:03:04:20 (calm music)
00:03:07:17 I often feel, in science, we are attracted to the exotic.
00:03:12:04 But sometimes curiosity drives you to the mundane,
00:03:16:20 and I think I'm very much, I like the mundane,
00:03:20:16 because I think when you uncover
00:03:22:03 a layer in the mundane and you
00:03:23:14 find something quite puzzling, that tells you that
00:03:26:24 we actually don't understand the mundane.
00:03:30:10 And my lab studies how cells actually become organisms.
00:03:35:24 Individual cells started sticking to each other
00:03:39:03 maybe 700, 800 million years ago
00:03:42:02 to form these ensembles of groups of cells.
00:03:46:01 But eventually these groups of cells
00:03:47:21 had to differentiate and really do
00:03:51:09 complex functions for these ensembles
00:03:54:13 to become what we call complex multicellular life.
00:03:59:01 It's hard to decipher how that got started,
00:04:03:03 but we have the privilege to be curious
00:04:06:08 which is a rare thing that we should
00:04:09:08 all as scientists value because
00:04:11:09 not everybody in life has that privilege.
00:04:15:04 And as a scientist I feel there is a
00:04:17:01 tremendous responsibility that we have,
00:04:20:15 not even to, I mean, make discoveries
00:04:22:19 and seek the truth but to also
00:04:25:21 share that opportunity with more people.
00:04:28:24 So, I think when I started my lab
00:04:30:16 it was very clear that I'll spend 50% of my time doing that.
00:04:35:20 You know, there's a funny story,
00:04:37:07 I started my lab at Stanford, I was promised
00:04:39:16 my lab will be done immediately
00:04:41:21 and I arrived to find out that there was no lab to be found
00:04:46:10 because of some construction goof ups and things like that.
00:04:49:10 So I took my students, I traveled to,
00:04:53:11 you know, remote places in Thailand, we went to India,
00:04:56:04 just asking a question, you know, what inspires us?
00:05:00:03 We were visiting many labs across Thailand
00:05:03:20 looking at how mosquito surveillance is actually done.
00:05:07:16 Mosquitoes are the most deadly organism on this planet.
00:05:11:13 So, there was this utter surprise that, in fact,
00:05:15:09 that such an important problem and how come
00:05:17:07 we don't have tools to really be able to
00:05:18:24 monitor mosquitoes at really large scales.
00:05:22:00 And at that time we started thinking about acoustics.
00:05:25:19 You know, if any of you have grown up
00:05:27:09 in a place that has mosquitoes
00:05:28:20 you realize there's this buzz,
00:05:30:14 there is enough of a signature
00:05:32:05 that the mosquitoes actually telling you who it is.
00:05:35:07 But our biggest insight was that
00:05:37:15 we were all carrying cell phones in our pockets
00:05:40:08 that have microphones, capability to record,
00:05:43:18 and capability to record geolocation,
00:05:47:10 that's what led to Abuzz.
00:05:50:02 Anybody who has a $20 flip phone
00:05:53:06 can actually record and contribute.
00:05:55:23 You know, when a flood comes around in Puerto Rico
00:05:58:15 you could ask yourself, how did that actually
00:06:00:15 change the distribution of mosquitoes?
00:06:02:19 You really need, for a problem like this
00:06:05:08 that's so important, that effects each one of us,
00:06:08:03 how do we enable everybody in society
00:06:10:24 to be able to contribute to a solution?
00:06:13:05 So, that's where the citizen science aspect of that
00:06:15:14 came about, but much of that happened in just traveling.
00:06:22:04 In India, I ended up in the middle of nowhere
00:06:24:24 seeing this pristine microscope.
00:06:28:06 You know, there was only one person
00:06:29:15 who knew how to operate it.
00:06:31:17 Every time you add an order of magnitude of cost
00:06:34:14 to your microscope, order of magnitude of people
00:06:37:19 will never be able to access it.
00:06:40:17 Foldscope is a microscope that we
00:06:42:24 came up with that's built via origami.
00:06:46:05 You fold it yourself with your own hands and within
00:06:49:22 15 to 20 minutes you have a fully functional microscope.
00:06:53:19 And a very simple goal that we have
00:06:55:24 with tools that we make is, if we can just make this world
00:06:59:22 more curious a place that would be enough.
00:07:02:21 There is a video that somebody just posted
00:07:05:11 from a school in Delhi of a kid
00:07:09:20 describing what it means to him.
00:07:12:05 I mean, here is a kid who lives on the street
00:07:15:02 and that sheer joy of, you know,
00:07:17:20 picking up an ant and understanding what it means.
00:07:22:01 Many times, when people collect Foldscope videos,
00:07:24:19 the audio is caught and then you hear a person thinking.
00:07:30:00 - Whoa.
00:07:34:10 - Oh my god.
00:07:36:23 - For the very first time I showed it to
00:07:40:00 a very famous academic scientist
00:07:42:07 who had a lab next door to me, I was a little bit hesitant.
00:07:46:07 You know, you are saving the world
00:07:48:13 developing all these sequencing technologies,
00:07:51:18 I'm making paper microscopes.
00:07:54:12 But, you know, in the end when I did show
00:07:56:10 he had a smile and then just, it's like,
00:08:00:02 you know, that person shared that sense of wonder
00:08:02:16 and I was like, yeah yeah yeah it's alright.
00:08:05:11 And I think since that time, I've learned my lesson
00:08:08:02 that, you know, this is your life, there is one life,
00:08:11:18 and it sounds very dramatic but your best work
00:08:14:09 will be the one that you're most passionate about.
00:08:16:19 You don't wait to do your best work,
00:08:19:07 you do it now and you do it with the rigor
00:08:22:04 and capabilities that you bring to the table
00:08:24:17 and you will see it will evolve
00:08:26:01 into something that you really dreamed of.
00:08:28:06 You know, you have to listen to yourself,
00:08:30:12 and very much in, if you don't listen to yourself
00:08:34:21 then you can't really be an honest scientist.
00:08:37:19 (calm music)

This Talk

Speaker: Manu Prakash

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: August 2018

Talk Overview

Manu Prakash always yearned to know the why and the how of things. As a boy in India, he spent endless hours playing outside with animals and making flammable artifacts in an abandoned lab in the basement of his home. Having the chance to explore his surroundings with open-ended curiosity, he learned to find the sublime in the mundane. Today, as a world-renowned researcher and inventor at Stanford University, he continues to be inspired by these childhood lessons, and is creating low-cost tools to empower people around the globe to go on their own journey of science and discovery.

Speaker Bio

Manu Prakash

Manu Prakash

Manu Prakash is an Associate Professor in Bioengineering at Stanford University, affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a Pew Scholar. His lab applies techniques derived from soft-condensed matter physics, fluid dynamics, computer science, and bioengineering to study the structure and function of biological entities. Prakash was born in Meerut, India, where… Continue Reading