Realm of Terracotta
Are inventors born or made? Find out how innovative people become inventors as we explore the workshops and laboratories of some of the most ingenious minds in the fields of materials, software, hardware, biotech, and agriculture. Learn what it takes to become an inventor and see what they must overcome to achieve success in entrepreneurship and invention. Invention is more accessible now than ever through low-cost electronics, rapid prototyping and inexpensive global communication and collaboration. We already have many of the tools necessary to address humanity's challenges; now we need individuals to harness the power of these tools to manifest those changes. The problem society faces is inspiring young inventors by helping them see the pathways that are available to them necessary to tackle these challenges. Many U.S. schools and universities have begun integrating a creative, trans-disciplinary problem-solving approach known as invention education that can help students of all backgrounds develop interest, confidence and capabilities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). David Sengeh, the minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and Chief Innovation Officer of Sierra Leone narrates a journey to the workshops, garages, laboratories and offices of accomplished inventors in the fields of materials, software, hardware, biotech and agriculture with an eye toward understanding the tools and traits of both successful invention and entrepreneurship. Inventor profiles are woven together through "thematic pods" that connect common traits, including: perseverance, resilience, utilizing and becoming mentors, being open to collaboration and understanding the impact of nature versus nurture on one's own pathway to invention. Nicole Black has been creating solutions since she was a little girl. As a girl, she grappled with hearing loss due to a perforated eardrum and wondered "why is such a simple problem so complicated?" After the Boston Marathon Bombing left countless others with a similar injury, she began a research collaboration with surgeons at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. The procedure for repairing ruptured eardrums is a complex surgery that involves hours of anesthesia. In about 40% of cases, the surgery is not fully successful. Feeling frustrated that such a seemingly simple problem only had such a complex solution she set out to develop an alternative. Her work in materials science led to a groundbreaking formulation of a 3D printed material that has proven to be a near-perfect replacement for human eardrum tissue, paving the way for a promising new alternative. Paige Balcom was visiting Uganda as a Fulbright Scholar when she became fascinated by the challenges of life in Gulu. When economic forces there conspired to trap millions of plastic bottles in the nation's ecosystem without any local options for recycling, Paige, then a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, decided to dedicate her research to developing a small-scale, community recycling process, a feat that nearly everyone, except her Ugandan co-founder Peter, said would be physically impossible. By employing street-connected, at-risk youth, Paige and her Takataka Plastics recycling team, are now turning waste into construction materials and providing a path for local youth to remain employed while working toward sustainability. Corten Singer and Tomás Vega, self-proclaimed Makers and hardware hackers, had a wheelchair-bound friend Danny with low vision who they wanted to help become more independent. One of Danny's major challenges was that he was unable to negotiate unfamiliar terrain. Even something as simple as uneven ground or a curb cut could prove deadly for him. The duo, undergraduates at UC Berkeley at the time, spent most of their free time in the university's makerspace, tinkering and printing a smart, nearly autonomous wheelchair system. When they decided he also needed a better control mechanism, they developed a sensitive mouth guard that would allow him to control this and almost any other device with the touch of his tongue. This MouthMouse is now the basis for their Bay Area startup Augmental Tech which employs five people developing technology for accessibility and sports medicine. Matthew Rooda and Abraham Espinoza couldn't have come from more dissimilar backgrounds. Matt grew up working in pork production in America's heartland; Abe was a mischievous boarding school student in Mexico. When the duo met at Buckeye Community College they began channeling their curiosity onto a laser focus on the massive problem of piglet crushing in the swine industry. Their invention, Smart Guard, has already saved millions of piglets by accurately identifying and isolating the sound of a piglet in distress using artificial intelligence and voice recognition. The device can then safely stimulate the sow to prevent her from suffocating her young. Now in their late 20s, Matt and Abe's company Swine Tech is expanding and integrating an entire swine management platform to ensure the health and safety of piggies and their mamas throughout their time on the farm. When Mira Moufarrej was a young girl her grandmother was diagnosed with rapidly progressing cancer. When she passed shortly after her initial diagnosis, Mira felt helpless. At first Mira thought she wanted to be a physician. At Stanford, she quickly discovered the possibilities in the field of bio-engineering, she knew she had found her passion. Her work at Stanford as a graduate student led to her discovery of genetic markers associated with pregnancy including fetal development and the risk to the mother of preterm birth and preeclampsia. Katherine Jin has always been an innovator. As a young girl, she was charged with feeding her baby sister. Finding the job of holding the bottle for sissy to be boring, she modified an articulating lamp to hold a baby bottle at just the right angle. In college, she and some friends learned of problems faced by health care workers tackling the Ebola crisis in Liberia. Knowing that ineffective decontamination was the main vector for spreading the deadly virus from patient to clinician, she set out to develop a method for visualizing the disinfection process with a unique color that would highlight surfaces that have been contacted with disinfectant and then slowly fade. Five years later, with her college friends by her side, she is the co-founder of a startup and is filling orders for New York's largest health care providers including the city's fire department. Geoff von Maltzahn was a unique child. He didn't learn to read until he was eight years old. But he had a deep understanding of the world around him that others began to notice. Geoff excelled at math and had a passion for art which led him to explore the world around him in intricate detail. By college, he was obsessed with the programmability of living things through the tiny bits of information encoded at a microscopic level. His inquisitiveness led him to raise more than five billion dollars to fund biotech and life science research that sounds more like futurism. Geoff and his colleagues aim to eliminate plant pesticides, create drought tolerant crops, sequester carbon and eliminate disease through the management of microbes and the programming of the DNA of organisms big and small. Growing up in Ghana, Mercy Asiedu saw firsthand the inequities of health care in developing nations. Each year about 500,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and more than half of them do not survive. About 90% of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries because more than half of women have never been screened. The main challenge is for women to gain access to expensive diagnostic tools which are often only found in large cities and remain inaccessible for women in more rural areas of developing nations. Mercy decided to create a low-cost, tampon-sized screening device that could be connected to a smartphone. Shaped like a calla lily, the Callascope allows for health care workers and women themselves to perform assessments of infections and to screen for signs of cervical cancer and other reproductive health issues. Josh Siegel is a renaissance man. Tinkering with car parts and electronics in his home workshop has kept him busy throughout his life and supplements his creative work as a professor at Michigan State University's Deep Technology Lab. He calls this tinkering, even if it is done without a clearly stated goal, "building an intellectual library." Early in his career, when Josh first ventured out into the business world, he quickly learned that one had to be creative and to be able to trust oneself. And that it is okay to be imperfect, as long as you're better than you were. He summarized: "We can invent things, we can invent products, we can invent services, we can create new capabilities, we can create new knowledge. But at the end of the day, what we're really doing is reinventing ourselves."
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