How Paradoxical Questions and Simple Wonder Lead to Great Science

[erronis]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-paradoxical-questions-and-simple-wonder-lead-to-great-science-20250528/

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.”

nside Manu Prakash (opens a new tab) are two scientists. A bioengineer at Stanford University, he spends half his time studying urgent health issues with global impact and the rest pursuing questions “of no use to anyone,” he said. To him, though, there is no conflict between these pursuits. Together, they represent something of a philosophy for life.
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Prakash is widely recognized for his pioneering low-cost scientific tools. In 2014, he invented the world’s cheapest microscope (costing less than $1), known as the Foldscope (opens a new tab), built primarily from a piece of paper; he has since distributed the device to amateur biologists all over the world.* He also dreamed up the paperfuge (opens a new tab), a hand-powered centrifuge that can separate blood components for medical diagnostics, and Inkwell (opens a new tab), a portable device for making blood smears to diagnose infectious diseases.

Those practical pursuits are worthwhile, he said, but Prakash is happiest on a boat, pulling up samples of seawater to investigate weird microscopic organisms for their own, glorious sake. He then figures out the physics and math that govern the often extraordinary behaviors of these single-celled critters.

Not many researchers pursue both applied and theoretical sciences with equal fervor, but Prakash argues that we cannot have one without the other. He has christened a new field at their intersection: recreational biology. Like recreational math, which pursues puzzles and games for the fun of it, Prakash’s recreational biology freely observes and asks questions about life as a form of play.

“We are humans, and curiosity defines us,” Prakash said. “Awe and wonder are wired in our brains,” and they are the foundation of all human discovery, he added.


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A close-up of Manu Prakash’s face: brown black hair with some gray strays, and a voluminous black beard.

“Half the time, I don’t care whether a piece of knowledge is useful,” Prakash said. “But the other half, it’s about studying the most urgent problem that nobody’s working on.”

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[Xipe Totec]

1. Knowledge for knowledge sake is a virtuous pleasure. nt