For those of us who were unable to attend the TED conference back in February (my couch cushions just couldn’t quite turn up the $6,000 price of admission), we are in luck! Today, Nathan Myhrvold’s talk was released for the world to see. Check out our founder highlighting several of our malaria projects, along with cameo appearances by 3ric Johanson and Pablos Holman.
We’ve been seeing more and more visitors from the media around here. The most recent journalist to peruse the lab was Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, who was looking for the lowdown on our malaria work. Although the Photonic Fence, a.k.a. the mosquito laser system, has gotten most of the press lately due to Nathan Myhrvold’s TED talk, we have several other malaria projects that are starting to turn heads as well.
The meat of the article follows Karima Nigmatulina, 
Ph.D. and Philip Eckhoff, Ph.D. (pictured above) and their disease modeling software. A few other projects got shout-outs as well. These include malaria detection tools headed by Michael Hegg, Ph.D. and Ben Wilson Ph.D. (pictured below), the artificial mosquito diet of Barcin Acar Ph.D. and Emma Mullen, and of course 3ric Johanson’s Photonic Fence. Even TerraPower managed to sneak in there.
Dan was a machine, bolting from group to group and scrawling endless notes in the process; we watched him fill up three whole pads of paper! The result is “Short-Circuiting Malaria,” which can be found on Newsweek‘s website and will be in print any day now. We appreciate the coverage and are excited that more of our projects are being recognized.
Check out the Newsweek article here.
You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.
Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.
Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.
In our efforts to fight malaria, the Photonic Fence has been getting all the attention lately, but this is just one of several ideas that we are actively working on to combat disease. Another key malaria project is Epidemiological Modeling. This is a highly detailed computer simulation that predicts how the disease spreads at local, regional and global scales. The model takes into account many variables that affect transmission such as temperature, population, transportation, and the use of vaccines, bed nets and even innovations such as the Photonic Fence.
There are a wide variety of epidemiological modeling approaches that many groups use to study malaria. Ultimately, our work and other existing approaches are used to evaluate and predict effective strategies for malaria eradication.
Mathematician, Philip Eckhoff, and computational scientist, Karima Nigmatulina, explain the project and software.
These high speed photographic images of mosquitoes were captured by Intellectual Ventures Laboratory scientists using a Vision Research Phantom V12.1, shooting at up to 6,000 frames per second. [read more about IV's malaria research]
Understanding Mosquito Flight: Intellectual Ventures researchers study flight dynamics of mosquitoes to look for novel ways to attack them. This video shows a technique called “Particle Image Velocimetry.” Tiny suspended water droplets, illuminated by a green planar laser, show the movement of the air around the mosquito’s wing.
Download video in high definition (58.9 MB)
Mosquito in Flight: This video depicts an Anopheles stephensi mosquito in flight. To capture this footage in focus, the mosquito was placed in a custom designed chamber that sensed when the mosquito flew through the focal plane.
Download video in high definition (19.3 MB)
Mosquito Shootdown Sequence: Video clips showing mosquitoes being killed by lasers. If played in real time, these segments would be roughly 1/10th of a second long.
Download video in high definition (26.2 MB)
Modeling the Eradication of Malaria
Despite decades of attempts to control malaria, the disease still afflicts some 250 million people every year and claims the lives of about one million, mostly children. The parasite that causes malaria has shown stubborn resilience against the most powerful antimalarial drugs, and the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite have similarly grown resistant to insecticides. Although there is great hope for an effective vaccine, none is yet available.
At Intellectual Ventures, we believe history shows that trying to control malaria is an insufficiently ambitious goal. We in the scientific and technical community should instead develop technologies and strategies that can be used to completely eradicate the disease. Much of the progress we make toward eliminating malaria will also be directly useful in exterminating other infectious plagues of humanity, such as polio and tuberculosis.
Toward this goal, a team led by Dr. Philip Eckhoff is developing a completely original computer model that calculates not only how malaria spreads in a particular part of the world, but also how it will respond to a deliberate suppression campaign. The goal of this model, more ambitious than any similar software ever attempted before, is not just to understand and control the disease, but to stamp it out completely.
Why We Work on Solutions for the Prevention, Detection and Eradication of Malaria
Why are you inventing in this area?
Humanity faces significant global health challenges that have been difficult to solve through traditional methods. Our hope is that through inventive thinking, we can find new ways to tackle some of these issues.
With regard to our malaria projects, we are actively pursuing several invention ideas that could help detect, prevent and eradicate the disease. We believe that introducing the right combination of these technologies—while keeping older approaches in place—will lead to a better chance of completely eradicating malaria.
But why malaria and not AIDS or other health issues?
We have a variety of global health projects underway. One reason we are focusing on malaria first is it is a disease that is both preventable and curable. Yet more than one million people—including half a million children—reportedly died of the disease last year.
The Wall Street Journal just did a front page article about what we call the “photonic fence.” It is a system that finds mosquitoes flying around, identifies them by wingbeat frequency, and then shoots them out of the sky with a laser. The idea decends from Reagan era “Star Wars” which basically tried to do the same thing for missiles. Here’s a great quote by Jordin Kare:
“We like to think back then we made some contribution to the ending of the Cold War” with the Star Wars program, Dr. Kare says. “Now we’re just trying to make a dent in a war that’s actually gone on a lot longer and claimed a lot more lives.”
As always, the reinterpretation by various blogs is more amusing:
This illustration shows one way our “photonic fence” mosquito laser system could be used to set up a perimeter defense, protecting a single building. The red “fence” shows a border that mosquitoes can’t pass through, but it is safe for everything else. There is no top coverage because mosquitoes don’t fly very high.
Neal Stephenson says:
A week ago Dave Nash, Barcin Acar, and I made a safari down to the soundproof booth in the warehouse and obtained some relatively high-quality recordings of male and female mosquitoes. Attached is a pair of MP3s for your listening pleasure. Also, I used Audacity to perform a simple frequency analysis of each clip. Plots are appended. The male has very sharp clear harmonics out to at least 17 x the fundamental tone. The female’s fundamental tone is less sharply defined (I think it was flying around more vigorously) and so the harmonics don’t show up as distinctly.
This is just a first attempt, and more in the nature of a practice & reconaissance run than anything, but I thought you all might find it interesting.
I have also appended a much more disturbing audio clip of a whole box full of mixed male & female mosquitoes.
