Today we live in a different world entirely. The human genome has been sequenced and the ethics of human cloning have become a matter of public debate; nanotechnology fantasies are yielding to prototypes of actual products (water-repelling glass, for example, is currently being developed for car windscreens), and handheld gadgets that can record, transmit, retrieve and manipulate our interminable flows of data can easily be purchased for a few hundred dollars.
Yet, beyond the digital wonderland that so many of us now take for granted, hundreds of millions of people continue to live in nineteenth or even eighteenth century squalor, struggling to find adequate food and healthcare, oblivious to and unaffected by the marvels of fiber optic cable and wireless telephony. The gap between these two worlds is closing, slowly, but it is still remarkably wide. Ten years ago, in his bestselling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out that half the planet had never even used a telephone. That ratio has certainly shrunk considerably by now, but the inequalities it expressed have changed little if at all.
A large part of the problem has been that technological advance is driven by economics. Countries that offer venture capital the prospect of generous profits understandably attract the lion’s share of innovation and infrastructural investment. Poorer, less stable countries usually have no choice except to wait for first world technologies to trickle down to their less sophisticated and dynamic markets. This would matter less if thousands of people in the developing world didn’t die every day from treatable and preventable illnesses, but unfortunately that is not the case. Even more distressing, perhaps, is the knowledge that most of these lives could be saved by such low-tech ‘solutions’ as proper toilet facilities or adequate mosquito netting.
Fortunately, modern aid has begun to take notice of this paradox. In a 2005 profile of Bill Gates, the journalist Michael Specter noted that: “Appeals for low-tech solutions by public-health leaders and by African scientists … were traditionally ignored, because they cost too much. In places where the government spends less than ten dollars a year on each citizen’s health, bed nets, drugs, and the use of various pesticides (which has kept the United States malaria-free) are out of the question.” Of course, the irony is that their reluctance to spend these relatively small sums usually creates far more expensive liabilities for governments in the developing world. Nevertheless, the international aid community has learned from many of its mistakes and it has started to make practical changes. Much of the success of The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for example, has come from its willingness to fund innovative low-tech measures that provide partial solutions to existing problems instead of always holding out for better long-term answers.
In that context, consider the potential of the “locally powered water distillation system” recently patented by the American inventor Dean Kamen. Designed to extract water from almost any source (even sea water and chemical waste) using readily available fuel such as wood, grass or cow dung, Kamen’s system promises to deliver up to 1,000 litres of water to a village, and to provide enough electricity to power basic lighting as well. The new process is said to use as little as 2 percent of the power that conventional distillation systems consume, and also to work without the filters, charcoal or membranes that are usually required. Kamen hopes to mass manufacture the components and to bring the price per unit down to as little as US$1,000.
Kamen has said that he hopes the system will help to reduce waterborne illnesses around the world by half – an astonishing hope given that more than 6,000 people die from water-related sicknesses each day. At five times the price and with half of its projected success rate, the system would still have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, and to do all of this very, very cheaply. Also, since micro-loans could easily fund the dispersal of the technology across many of the world’s poorest areas, the time-frame in which its impact could be felt is reassuringly short.
A world in which potable water is suddenly brought within reach of the average villager may not sound like a great scientific leap forward, but for the half of the world that had never even made a phone call ten years ago, it would be a sort of magic to rival anything currently on offer in Silicon Valley. If Kamen’s invention lives up to its billing – and until it is tested in the real world that remains a significant if – then we may discover that the most important technological innovation of the early twentieth century will not come from the marvels of micro-electronics and molecular biology but from the refinement of a century-old technique of purifying water through vaporization, from something that is essentially nothing more than a better way to boil water. Imagine that.
