You will never have heard of Sheldon Kaplan, and yet, he has made an incredible impact on the lives of many people you know, and possibly your own. He is the inventor of the ComboPen, an early auto-injector syringe used to combat nerve gas. He is also the person who realised that this system could be used in other applications - like the more well known EpiPen, which he also invented. He died about two weeks back.
Many people who have designed/built/invented medical equipment are sadly overlooked in any capacity except for in obscure textbooks about medical history or occasionally for the Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine (again mostly ignored), and yet, they usually make a difference in most peoples lives. For example how many of you have heard of Roald Dahl? How many of you knew that he helped develop the WDT valve for alleviating hydrocephalus, a developmental disease more common than Down Syndrome.
This is a sadly ignored part of research and design.
However, now that I've mentioned the Nobel Prizes, how can I fail to lead you to the Ig-nobel prizes; the awards that are given to achievements that that first make people laugh then make them think, and according to Nature magazine are "arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." It is a list of absolute, whacked out, brilliance that Australians feature on possibly more frequently than our population would normally allow. It features things that often deserve more attention than they get, for example, Lal Bihari, the (not) dead founder of the Association for Dead People, an Indian organisation that actively lobbys on behalf of people who have been wrongly declared dead and therefore no longer exist - leaving them unable to work, travel, acquire property etc, despite being still alive. Or this years Peace Prize (slightly more deserving than Barack Obama in my opinion), Stephan Bolliger and associates from the university of Bern, Switzerland for their research on whether it is better to be hit in the face by a beer bottle if it is full or empty. Or my personal favorite, the Australian man who in 2001 invented and patented the wheel. (the patent application and acceptance can be seen here)
Click here for more details on the award and the winners.
This is a sadly ignored part of research and design.
However, now that I've mentioned the Nobel Prizes, how can I fail to lead you to the Ig-nobel prizes; the awards that are given to achievements that that first make people laugh then make them think, and according to Nature magazine are "arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." It is a list of absolute, whacked out, brilliance that Australians feature on possibly more frequently than our population would normally allow. It features things that often deserve more attention than they get, for example, Lal Bihari, the (not) dead founder of the Association for Dead People, an Indian organisation that actively lobbys on behalf of people who have been wrongly declared dead and therefore no longer exist - leaving them unable to work, travel, acquire property etc, despite being still alive. Or this years Peace Prize (slightly more deserving than Barack Obama in my opinion), Stephan Bolliger and associates from the university of Bern, Switzerland for their research on whether it is better to be hit in the face by a beer bottle if it is full or empty. Or my personal favorite, the Australian man who in 2001 invented and patented the wheel. (the patent application and acceptance can be seen here)
Click here for more details on the award and the winners.
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