Read Online The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy - Free Book Online

kind of understanding—of tedium, of tired muscles, of hunger pangs—that Smith brings to her designs.

    An hour later, in Smith’s “D-lab” class, students gather around a huge, black-topped slab of a table. It’s the first semester of design lab, and these undergrads are learning about the politics of delivering technology to poor nations, how to speak a little Creole, and the nitty-gritty of mechanical engineering; during the
mid-semester break, they’ll travel to Haiti, Brazil or India. There, they will act as consultants in remote villages, helping locals to solve technical problems. Oh yes, and the students will also test village drinking water for dangerous bacteria.
    Today, Smith is training them to do just that. Students practice, using a small pump to pull polluted water (from the Charles River) through a filter. Smith points to a piece of the water-testing rig—what looks like a silver barbell. “This test stand costs $600. Personally, I find that offensive.” When the students work in the field, she says, they will be using a far cheaper setup—one that she patched together herself for about $20 last year, using a Playtex baby bottle. “You can do a lot more testing for the same amount of money.”
    Now the students have made cultures of Charles River water in petri dishes. The next step is to incubate the petri dishes for an entire day at a steady temperature. But how do you pull that off in a lean-to in Haiti, with no electricity for miles around? Again, Smith has a solution. She passes around a mesh bag of what appears to be white marbles. The “marbles” contain a chemical that, when heated, will stay at a steady 37 degrees Celsius for 24 hours. The balls are the crucial ingredient in one of Smith’s inventions—
a phase-change incubator that requires no electricity. The design won Smith the 1999 BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors’ Award. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may soon endorse her incubator, and “from there it’s not a big step to go to the Red Cross,” she says. One day it could be a key piece of equipment at rural health clinics in Africa, Haiti, India—where doctors depend on intermittent electricity or none at all.
    At the moment, however, Smith is still in the process of manufacturing the incubators—she has founded a startup company to handle the exigencies of getting her incubators up and running, and out into the field. “I have 6000 of these balls on their way here from China as we speak,” she says.
    Now, Smith wants to demo a bacteria test in the dark. She asks a student to cut the lights. He flips a switch. For a moment, nothing happens and then the room vibrates with a mechanical hum, and panels close over a bank of skylights in the ceiling. Everyone cranes their necks to watch. The panels move in menacing slo-mo, like something out of a James Bond movie. A few people giggle, as if they’ve suddenly become aware of the contradictions thrumming in this room—they’ve come to one of the best-funded technical institutes in the world to learn how to work with Playtex baby bottles.

    A few weeks from now, Smith will give them one of their toughest lessons in the gaps between first world and third. The students will spend a week surviving on $2 a day in Cambridge—the equivalent of what the average Haitian earns.
    Last year, Jamy Drouillard—who TA-ed Smith’s class—performed the assignment along with his students. Drouillard grew up in Haiti, but that didn’t give him any special edge. He laughs, remembering his chief mistake. “I bought a bunch of Ramen noodles, a bunch of spaghetti, and some ketchup. It got sickening after Day Three. Actually, before Day Three. I should have mixed and matched instead of buying ten boxes of spaghetti. In Haiti, people come up with creative ways of varying their food intake.” He said the assignment drove