Science Friday - The Leap: A Scientist’s Quest To See Every Organism On Earth

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Manu Prakash is many things—biologist, engineer, inventor, philosopher—but what he isn’t is conventional. Following his instincts has led Manu to his most ambitious project yet: mapping the whole tree of life, with the help of everyone on this planet. Step one: make a cheap microscope anyone can use. Foldscope co-inventor Jim Cybulski describes their invention, and their dream to supply millions of microscopes to the masses. Manu has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a Scout for his bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. “The Leap” is a 10-episode audio series that profiles scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. It premieres on Science Friday’s podcast feed every Monday until July 21. “The Leap” is a production of the Hypothesis Fund, brought to you in partnership with Science Friday.Transcript is available on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We're ready to go. Strap on this life vests. We're going out in a boat. Yeah, okay. So I think it's better to just stabilize yourself. So we're going to now feel the wind. We're with scientist Manu Prakash speeding into Buzzard's Bay off of Cape Cod. It's early in the morning and Manu is up late in the lab.

But it doesn't seem to get to him. That's it. That's the coffee. Now we're all out. That's all we needed. We're going fishing for the ocean's tiniest inhabitants. All right, Nets in, Bill. Which is something Manu does all over the globe.

You see the little shine. Those are diatoms, the floating diatoms. On this last trip we saw this really beautiful diatom. It's Nichea. And it crawls on another diatum, this catacetrus, on its whiskers. So it's like this diatum has moustaches, very long moustaches. moustaches and it will just crawl back and forth in it.

Like, I've seen both of them in isolation a thousand times in the field. First time I see what they do together. And the Nitya is hitching a ride. That's the joy of this job. You could spend a lifetime on a boat looking at stuff and you're still looking at new stuff every single day. You don't run out of work. Just can't run out of work.

Yeah. You can't run out of work. You can't run out of work when your goal is to see every single creature on Earth. This is The Leap, a new series about scientists who are risking their reputations, their careers, and even their lives to discover something new. If I have an intuition, I will follow it no matter what. No matter what people say, no matter what I read, if I have an intuition, I'll follow it. Manu Prakash is not easy to sum up. He's a MacArthur Genius Award winner and a bioengineering professor at Stanford.

But that doesn't really capture his work. In practice, he's a physicist, a biologist, an oceanographer, a toolmaker, an explorer, a field researcher. And he's putting all of these disciplines together in service of one fantastically grand quest. To map the entire tree of life with the help of... everyone on Earth. The bigger puzzle is really how the life is organized on this planet. And then the quest really becomes, can you see the whole of it?

Like, can in my lifetime I can see every organism that has ever been described, maybe one millimeter and below. That's an insane goal. I think it would be awesome to see every single thing and spend time with it. Like, you know, I think it can be done. How did he get to this big idea? Manu grew up in India, and he loved science ever since he was a kid, and he did well. He got accepted into one of the IITs, the Indian Institute of Technology.

It's super competitive. Like, people introduce each other, not by their names, but the ranking they got in the national score. Like, what the hell? Wait, like, give me an example. Play it out. I'll just call a friend Chavani. Chavani in Hindi means 25. 25 is his rank in the total ranking system of like a million people that applied for this exam.

So you can see how much pressure there is. Now, some people thrive in these ultra-competitive environments. Like, it lights a fire in them. That was not Manu. I won't say my grades on audio, but I had pretty low grades. The fact that I ever made to grad school is insane. Like, I've never gotten an, other than my first semester, I never got an A. Like, forget about it. It's B, C, C, and D's.

But Manu wasn't slacking off. It's just that while his classmates were, like, you know, jockeying for front row seats, clamoring to get called on. Manu wasn't even in the room. Like, my undergrad, I spent in a children's school second and first graders. and I was watching how they draw, and I was writing a computer program from their drawings to be able to draw like a child. That's amazing that you wanted to do that as an undergrad,

to create a program that draws like a child. It's not that I wasn't working. I was working hard on all these other things and other ideas that took so much more time. Like, you'll kind of find it funny now, like, once we're opening up. My first patent is a patent in India. where built this robotic katputli, Katputli means a puppet.

We have these very traditional puppet shows. It's a very famous thing in India. We do this in Rajasthan and other places. So it's basically a completely automated system that you don't need a puppet master at the back. You just program the whole damn thing from a computer sitting over. And I did a show for that.

So, I mean, it took time, right? So when you do that type of stuff, you're clearly not attending classes. But, you know, I think it was important. It was actually very formative. It taught me that I can create my own boundary around what I think is important, what is successful. So you created this internal barometer for success. Did you have to develop it? I think I would say it is survival.

It's not you develop this because you know that there is no other way out. because I would have, like, died of boredom. So what I mean by survival was, like, oh, I need to find ways to pursue creative things. Otherwise, the other option doesn't look very good. And then the hope is that others would value it. So, like, when you go down the deep end, you go to the far deep end. I think that's really maybe what I'm trying to say. You do.

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just saying that you. don't want to do where everybody else is already looking. This approach worked for Minut. Even though he wasn't the best student on paper, people at his university saw something in him and vouched for him. He got into MIT for grad school. And again, he paddled away from the crowds.

He got to work on a bubble computer, a computer that uses bubbles as bits. And if that's hard to wrap your mind around, it's not just you. It was out there even for MIT. I arrived. I was in a applied physics lab. All my friends around me, they were all working on quantum computing. It was the most important thing at that time. Our lab had shown that we can divide 15 with like a $20 million of equipment. With a quantum computer. You got a quantum computer to do like a very simple calculation.

That's correct. They were doing that and it was like the biggest thing of the time. And I just was like, nah, you know, it's, it's, uh, and I was thinking about bubbles at that time and I was walking in this corridor and I had the other friend, who's a good friend of mine, he was in charge of the intel at that time at MIT had this amazing strange germanium like a 20 million dollar equipment and he was in charge and he would tell me all these things about like oh how important that was and then he would turn around. I was like, what are you working on? And I was very hesitant to tell him that I'm thinking about bubbles and, like, making a computer out of a bubble.

And, like, so I would avoid him whenever we would walk down the corridor. Like, you were afraid that he was going to look down on it? That, like, he would laugh. It would be sort of, like, a quirky thing. Yeah. Like, you get laughed out of rooms all the time. I think that's true. People really have opinions.

especially about what others should do. That bubble computer work? It made it to the journal Science, by the way. So Manu's an expert now in bubble computers and AI programs that mimic how children draw. How do you get from there to mapping the entire tree of life? Well, it was partly thanks to a roadblock Manu hit after he graduated and landed a job. In 2011, Manu got offered a professor position at Stanford. Danford. And you might think, like, oh, Manu has made it. He can relax. But actually, the pressure

was just ramping up. The 10-year clock had started. He had to hire students, get funding, do science, publish, and immediately Manu hits a speed bump. I had arrived on campus to learn that my lab won't be ready in like nine months or a year. The building was under construction. It was a big down moment as like, holy shit, I can't even start. my lab, I can't recruit anybody. So, Manu decides to go to the field. He wants to apply his physics expertise to real-world problems, problems he saw growing up in India.

Of course, you see pain in the world and you ask yourself a question, what am I doing about it? I think when I started the lab, I'd already decided that I was going to send 50% of a time pursuing what I deeply just care about, like, the analogy to how to draw like a child. But on the other hand, the other half was about there is so much inequality in this world. How do we positively contribute? So Manu decides to focus on malaria. So he rounds up some students and he takes them to Thailand. And it was a rough trip.

We're like we're going to go to the most mosquito infected places. And, you know, I took my students and one of them quit on the time. trip. So we were in like leech-infested rainforest and I wanted to see them and like he's like leeches are my boundary. So Manu has no lab. He's losing students to leach sensitivities. But this important thing happens. Manu visits this remote venom clinic and it has this fancy fluorescent microscope. It's really expensive. People are intimidated by it because it costs so much money, and it is locked away. It didn't feel right.

Like, it felt this super expensive thing sitting in the middle of nowhere in a rainforests with pouring rain, and nobody's there. And this experience kind of dovetails in Manu's mind with another microscope running he had in India. There's a place in India where there's a Gandhi ashram. Like, this is where Gandhi used to, Mahatma Gandhi, used to spend his time.

And there's this photograph that actually stuck there that I hadn't seen before, although I grew up in India. It's kind of funny. It's Gandhi looking through a microscope. And there was this irony in this photograph. Like, he was now wearing any clothes. He's wearing a white cloth around his waist. Because this was the non-cooperative movement,

so they were burning pants, quite literally. But at the same time, he's using this European-made microscope. It's just this sense of, oh, like, science can truly bridge and can bring a certain... I used to say it was a very iconic kind of a thing that stuck with me for a long time. So Manu came back with this clarity, this sense of purpose, that microscopes were this powerful tool, they could bridge cultures. But they're constructed to be these precious objects. They're finely tuned lenses and mirrors make them delicate and expensive and therefore locked away.

So Manu wondered, what if you could change all that? I came back and the first grant I wrote now, this is a very grander, this is. laughed out of the room moment. I had visited a matchstick factory before, and I knew that you could make a billion matsticks in a day. Like, I just saw this massive machinery churning out matchsticks. And I was like, okay, we're going to take a manufacturing technology that already works, and we're going to, instead of turning matchsticks,

why can't I churn microscopes? Could he mass produce cheap microscopes? He had a design, and it was unusual. It used a fireworks chemical reaction to illuminate the sample. Like, I actually submitted a grant to somebody where there was fire and there was microscopes. He didn't get it. But the seed of the idea was planted. And soon after Manu met a student, who also saw the potential of this project.

We had a very clear vision of the type of people that we wanted to serve. This is Jim Sibolsky. He was a grad student in Manu's lab. and he took on this microscope project. Minou and I both started, you know, not exactly. I don't know if I would say poor, but on the poor side, not in rich families. And so it's just fun to think, oh, if I would have had this, I could have done that. So they set out to design a low-cost microscope.

And like in three weeks, we actually had what became version one of a voltscope. The Foldscope was born. A paper microscope that. that comes together like origami, with different pieces of cardboard folding on top of each other. Inside is a single ball lens, which is one of the key innovations.

You can hold the fold scope to your eye or snap it onto your cell phone. With it, you can see single-celled organisms, even bacteria. It's sturdy enough to survive a drop from a third-story building, and it fits in your pocket. And the cost of materials?

A dollar. So they started submitting the design to journals. And like, you know, you have this moment when you share your thing with someone and say, how are they going to react? It's like your baby's ugly kind of a moment. And I remember that across with many people,

even when it was fully functional, it had like the same kind of specs that it exists now. People couldn't fathom the idea that we're going to make something that's supposedly so delicate and so precious out of something that's like art and craft. There was this underlying tone of people questioning the approach that we were taking. You know, if people spent a lot of time in their career doing microscopy and then you claim,

oh, we get comparable performance for a dollar that is bound to raise eyebrows. Because it somehow challenges the idea that to do good science, you have to do it on fancy microscopes at a fancy institution. Yeah, our goal is to break the model. a lot of people don't want to break the model. Despite the skepticism, Foldscope got through the peer review gauntlet, and Manu and Jim published the paper in 2014. And at this point, Manu, a young professor at a very competitive institution, racing against the tenure clock,

could have very easily just taken the publication win and moved on. He'd proved the idea was possible, leave it to someone else to get it into people's hands. After all, public outreach is not the kind of work that typically gets you tenure or advances your scientific career. But Manu wasn't calculating that way. He had an intuition, and again, he followed it. I walked in into a lab and really, almost on a whim, I just declared to Jim,

we're going to ship 10,000 fold scopes, and he kind of looked at me, and he knows me, and so he sort of smiled to a certain thing. He was confused. And we had no money. Foldscope is cheap, but international shipping is not. I think I had at that time around 100, 150K left in my bank for the lab. And I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, and it was telling me it was going to cost around $250,000 to just ship microscopes around the world. When I said, well, that meant everybody.

You know, it didn't matter which country. If we were going to get a request from Congo, we're going to ship to Congo. But I just was adamant. I think it's one of these scenarios where you have to believe you can do it and you have to start on the path and then hope that something will present itself that will enable you to proceed. It was insane, like this room that was filled with scissors and supplies. So a lot of cutting, a lot of cutting. All done in the lab.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Graduate students, yeah. Manu was out on a limb, and it's not just because he was thinking his startup money. Distributing microscopes to any kid or adult who wants one anywhere in the world, that's not a traditional research project. It wasn't about making a discovery that was going to land him in a big journal. And so some colleagues were skeptical. You know, as a young professor, you're always told, oh, you know, you need to do what fits in the framework of a profession.

And I just, I absolutely hate that. I know somebody from the grapevine heard about what I was doing and, you know, senior mentors around me, they reached out. It's like, oh, you know, so what is your plan? What are you trying to do? And I just, you know, all I said is I just want to see what people do with this in the world. No questions ask, nothing in return. Let them figure out what's best for them. You know, not for us. We don't need anything other than just people to play and explore. and the risk there was just trusting others.

And I built that very deeply in a lot of things that we do. I start with the position of trust. You guys! Oh, my God, look at that! Oh, there's all kinds of silliest. I cannot believe how good that is. We can barely get our microscope to see those. Human mind is so curious.

Once you share sets of capabilities, they will explore. Manu and Jim started a company for Foldscope. Jim's the president. They've distributed almost 2 million fold scopes to people in over 160 countries. They created a website where people can upload videos they took with their fold scope attached to their phone. And you can hear and see people all over the globe, scooping out teaspoons of pond scum, grabbing the hairs of their dogs, taking droplets of their own blood, and making discoveries. That is amazing.

Oh, look at that. Literally anybody walking around can make profound discoveries on this planet just by observing, putting those pieces together. And you have to enable that. You have to enable that by making sure that scientific tools. are just part and parcel of our life and our culture. Manu has enabled that joy of discovery for millions of people. That is a profound contribution. But for Manu, this isn't just about lighting up people's curiosity

or letting them in on this secret, invisible world. This is also about real science, about Manu's grand quest to map the tree of life. If we truly want to understand this ship, that we are on, we must take an approach that is driven by millions of people walking around and observing. When we do that at a planet scale, like the rate of discovery would be astronomical. And it does require sometimes to meet these characters, you have to go to their homes. They don't come to you.

And that does require you to be dangling off of trees or going out at sea and it just, I think I feel like at least if I have a good, true personal acquaintance with a significant portion of the tree of life, that would make me happy. Yeah, real true personal acquaintance. Why do you think that getting acquainted with the tree of life, why is that your thing? I think the why is very simple. Every organism is an idea. and every one of them is a new idea. It's not just about the classical way people have thought about evolution.

Oh, there was a niche. This must be the optimal way. No, some organisms are just absolutely profoundly, for the lack of a better word, strangely dumb. Like, just, it's like, what the hell? That's not how you should do it. And that's still an idea. There are a lot of dumb ideas. Right, exactly.

That's what I'm trying to say. I don't want to put every one of them on a pedestal of just this, oh, what a beautiful puzzle it's solved. It's like, and then you see once a while just this brilliant thing that an organism does that we've never just thought about. It's like, oh, I'm going to steal photosynthetic organelles from another animal and don't have to eat ever again. Or I'm going to ride your whiskers. I'm going to ride your whiskers. That's correct. Yeah.

Like, what that's a brilliant idea. With every new idea, we understand our world a little better. There are now over 1,400 scientific papers referencing Foldscope. Discoveries in diagnostics and public health and agriculture. People have even discovered new species using Foldscope. Adding new twigs to the tree of life, just as Manu trusted they would. Oh, wow. Oh, this is an incredible one.

Hold it. Hold it. Do you see your hair? Yeah. You see the big line? So you have to pass this one around to everything. I'm not saying this is easy. I'm not saying I'm good at it or something.

But it's just you have to strip science away from what other people think. It really is what you think. Sometimes I think about people that I want to reach that I haven't reached. and that's, like, I judge myself on that. Or, like, sometimes someplace in the tree of life is taunting me. Like, you know, you'll never understand me. I'll judge myself on that. But I think these are all internal.

Like, having an internal parameter, using that as an anchor to say whether you're successful, that's far more interesting. The Leap is a production of the Hypothesis Fund. Manu has been recognized by the Hypothesis Fund as a scout. for his bold science and enabling others to pursue their big ideas. You can learn more about this recognition and volunteer role on the website. This show is hosted by me, Flora Lickman, and produced by Annette Heist,

editing by Devin Taylor, Pajau-Vangay and David Sanford, fact-checking by Nicole Fasulka, additional production help from Ruth Lickman. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger, music by Joshua Budo Carp. Special thanks to Christine Curiehara, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and to all the Foldscope users all over the world

who shared their observations online. And thanks to you for listening. We're back tomorrow with a conversation about bedbugs. Turns out we've been sleeping with them since before there were beds. I'm not going to lie, they give me the egg. However, from a genetic lens, these are a really interesting and unique species. Can you learn to love the bed bug? We'll find out.