2004-10-24
This is Bob Doughty with the VOA Special English Development
Report.
Two winners of MacArthur Fellowships are being honored for their
work with technology in the developing world. Amy Smith and David
Green are among twenty-three MacArthur Fellows chosen for this year.
Each will receive five hundred thousand dollars, paid over the next
five years.
The MacArthur Foundation chooses highly creative individuals in
the United States who show great promise for the future. People are
nominated secretly. There are no restrictions on how the award can
be spent.
Amy Smith teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Cambridge. She served in the Peace Corps in Botswana. She is a
mechanical engineer who develops labor-saving technologies for poor
people. One of her inventions is a low-cost machine to crush grain.
Another is a device to test water quality without a laboratory.
In two thousand, Amy Smith became
the first female winner of the Lemelson-M.I.T. Student Prize. She
won thirty thousand dollars. But she tells us that she usually has
very little money to pay for her projects. She currently has several
in Haiti.
For example, Haitians traditionally use trees to make charcoal
for cooking fires. But most of their trees have been cut down. Also,
smoke from wood fires is bad for breathing. So, last year, Amy Smith
helped a group of students develop a process to make sugarcane waste
into cooking fuel.
David Green lives in Berkeley, California. He brings together
experts to start companies that produce high-quality medical
products at low cost. He calls his way of doing business
"compassionate capitalism."
Four years ago, Mister Green started Project Impact. This is a
non-profit group that works to develop and produce medical
technologies in several countries around the world.
Over the years, David Green also
launched a project to sell high-quality hearing aids at a low price.
And he started a company in India that makes corrective devices for
people with cataracts and other eye diseases.
The Aurolab company now sends these special lenses to more than
eighty-five countries. They cost about four dollars each, compared
to about one hundred dollars in the United States.
David Green says he wants to use his MacArthur award to expand
his work. He says his next project is to provide low-cost AIDS drugs
to poor nations.
This VOA Special English Development Report was written by Jill
Moss. This is Bob Doughty.