Famous US Inventor Tests BOP Water Project
Visionary, U.S. inventor Dean Kamen, perhaps best know for creating the Segway Personal Transporter, isn’t worried about gas prices or an impending energy crisis. A new future is just around the corner, with many innovative techniques about to be discovered to get fuel from plant materials, he said. "It’s now become economically viable to invest in change. There was no practical incentive when oil was practically free and no one cared about the environment," Kamen told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. Kamen was participating in the unveiling of a 2,200-square-foot LEGO recreation of the city’s riverside textile mills, which date back to the 1900s.
The new exhibit is featured at the SEE Science Center located in one of the renovated mill buildings that are part of the display. Kamen founded the science center, one of many projects he has sponsored to interest young people in science and technology.
"This mill itself is an incredible treasure chest of history, and this model will help keep it and help people learn about it," he said at the unveiling. But Kamen’s interest in the past doesn’t stop him from envisioning a bright future.
Someday patients will go into their doctors’ offices and provide a saliva swab or pinprick of blood that can be entered into a computer, which will design a drug treatment that’s unique to each person’s biochemistry, he predicts.
"That’s literally going to personalize medicine," he said. "You’re going to see medicine accomplish things you never could imagine."
Alzheimer’s disease may soon join the scourge of polio, now prevented by a simple $2 vaccine, he said. The high cost of medicine just presages these changes. "We are just in the learning phase, the expensive development phase," he said.
Kamen is currently at work on a water treatment system that was successfully tested just a couple months ago in a village in Honduras, he said. The portable device turns contaminated water into clean water by distilling it, using a fraction of the energy required by traditional distillation systems. Kamen predicts such systems could help solve health problems caused by waterborne pathogens all over the world.
Another of his inventions was recently used to supply electricity to two small villages in Bangladesh, he said. These generators used methane gas from cow dung to provide power to homes that had never had electricity before.
"We’re trying to build products for people who have no clean water and no power," he said. The challenge has been finding people to invest in more than prototypes. As Kamen wryly notes, people who have no clean water or power typically have no money and that can make it difficult to develop a business plan.
But Kamen says he’s not one to give up. Everything he’s ever done has taken longer than he expected, he said.
"People will never change as quickly as the technology will allow them to," he said.
Source: Boston Herald
