Ray Avery, Medicine Mondiale, Live from TEDx Auckland

Ray is an inventor, a scientist, and an all-around humanitarian.
 
He's going to talk about 2 things: his innovation from an academic scientist to an applied scientist.  Each year, a list gets published of the world's 25 most innovative nations. Sadly, New Zealand doesn't get a mention -- because we're special! We're hidden down here in Antarctica Riviera -- nobody knows we're here!
 
When you see something, and can touch it, and can make something of it, that's applied knowledge, and that's what New Zealand's good at. Because we're only 5 million people! We can watch things and see what they do and make things happen. Colin Murdoch -- a Kiwi -- was sitting at his kitchen table and he took a pen apart, and thought, 'That's pretty cool! What if I could put a plunger in there?' So he went into his garage and invented the disposable syringe. One person nobody's ever heard of -- and he changed the world.
 
At the age of 26 Ray was one of the world experts on photosynthesis, and he was waiting for people to bring it up at parties, but it never happened. Knowledge is open source; people will help you with your endeavours, and with a little help, we can change the world.
 
The current global economic model is not sustainable: 90% of the world's wealth is concentrated in 10% of the countries. But this is a huge opportunity for social development. We've got this huge emerging market, and if we can engage this market we can make the world a much more egalitarian place. Companies that are smart enough to tailor their offerings to the needs of global low income consumers will thrive.
 
There are gloval marketing opportunities in healthcare, education, telecommunications, manufacturing... If you go to Nepal, for example, you can rent some time on a cellphone. You can buy a single cigarette, or even a puff of a cigarette! Somebody saw a marketing opportunity to give purchasing power to even the lowest paid person.
 
In the 90s he met Fred Hollows who was trying to set up solutions for cataract blindness in Nepal. There are approximately 20 million cataract blind in the developing world. He shows a picture of a guy with cataracts -- one eye is almost entirely white. The treatment is to surgically remove the opaque lens of the eye and replace it with aphakic glasses -- but they're not very nice! They're like Coke bottle bottoms, and if you lose the glasses you're effectively blind.
 
So Ray went to Eritrea, and learned that you should always ask not only if your hotel room has toilet and door, but also if it has a roof. But the Fred Hollows IOL Lab Asmara, Eritrea commenced commercial production in January 2004. Today, these labs product 13% of the global market for IOLs (intraocular lenses). This technology replaces the old aphakic glasses, and they've been able to bring the price down to $10 per lens and provide these solutions in low income markets.
 
Now their goal is to develop sustainable solutions to global poverty, and they found that the most common procedure, which is IV therapy. If you're lucky enough to be in Auckland, you'll have a $2000 IV infusion pump monitoring your IV, but if you're in a developing country your IV is regulated by a 50 cent roller clamp. The problem is exacerbated for young children, because they need such a small amount of medicine that the roller clamp was always giving them the wrong amount. So they developed a $6 reusable IV Flow controller that is intuitive to use with a similar accuracy and precision to the $2000 pump.
 
This little controller can improve the health of over 2 billion people.
 
Socioeconomic nutritional products: they developed a range of nutritional products for the treatment of dehydration. They took the lessons from developing that product and applied it to the sports nutrition market, so they can make money in the first world and make sure that their distribution model to the developing world is sustainable.
 
Medicine Mondiale has no employees; all of their innovations were developed by New Zealanders for free!