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Democracy put to the test

Developing countries that free themselves from authoritarian governments are often called ?experiments in democracy.? But what happens when a researcher runs an actual field experiment in democracy? A novel study by MIT economist Benjamin Olken has provided surprising insights about the impact of democratic government in the developing world.

In fieldwork involving 49 Indonesian villages, Olken arranged to have major decisions on public-works projects in some settlements decided by plebiscite ? in which all citizens get a vote ? rather than by the traditional small councils of village leaders. Unexpectedly, the types of projects selected by majority vote were nearly identical to those picked by village elites; the voting public did not try to redistribute wealth to themselves. And yet when people were allowed to vote, they expressed greater contentment with the results than when decisions were simply handed down by the elites. The conclusion was that even if democracy doesn?t make a material difference in people?s lives, it creates greater civic cohesion.

?I expected more of a change in the outcomes,? says Olken, an associate professor in MIT?s Department of Economics. ?But there is more satisfaction and potentially more legitimacy through these direct democratic institutions, as opposed to having a decision made by a small set of people.?

In turn, the study challenges a popular view in development economics: that ?elite capture? of politics ? the control of government decision-making by a small group ? only enriches a select few. ?I was thinking that giving more power to everyone could take away elite dominance,? notes Olken. ?But that didn?t come out in the data.? Instead the results suggest two plausible ways of looking at local political elites, in Indonesia and elsewhere: ?One is that elites are bad guys, trying to steal money for themselves,? says Olken. ?The other is that elites are leaders doing a good job of making sure things are allocated the right way.?

Java, unscripted

Indonesia is a logical place to study political development, having thrown off the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998 after 31 years of rule. Since then, the government has been exploring ways to decentralize politically.

Olken performed his study in 2005 and 2006 in three distinct rural subdistricts: The heavily Muslim area of East Java, the more Christian-populated North Sumatra, and a socially diverse region, Southeast Sulawesi. The median village size was about 1,500 households in Java, and about 230 in the other areas. Each village was given infrastructure projects to implement, often involving roads, sanitation and water. Where the projects were decided by plebiscite, about 80 percent of the village voted ? a 20-fold increase in participation compared to the usual village meetings. All the villages are part of an Indonesian program, the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP), funded by the World Bank; Olken is also affiliated with the MIT-based Jameel Abdul Latif Poverty Action Lab, which backs field experiments in development economics.

The results, unveiled in a working paper, ?Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia,? will be published in the American Political Science Review later this year. By an 18 percent margin, villagers who voted were more likely to say the public works in question would benefit them, even when the projects were substantively similar to ones the village councils had chosen. Voting villagers were also more satisfied with the overall KDP program, by a margin of 13 percent, and were even more likely to contribute something of their own ? money, labor or food ? to the project, by a margin of 17 percent, indicating the greater enthusiasm generated by participatory democracy.

Olken?s study has earned him considerable notice among colleagues, who assert that no social scientist had previously conducted a randomized field experiment altering the political system used by people. ?It represents the first effort to study real-world democracy in a natural setting where the stakes mean something to the participants,? says Donald Green, a professor of political science at Yale. And precisely because the villagers and the chiefs approved similar projects, the study uniquely isolates the question of how much democracy matters to people, even if it doesn?t add to their wealth.

In Green?s view, this result ?can be taken two ways. If you think direct democracy is a sham, you note that it brings legitimacy without changing the distribution of goods. If you are a supporter of direct democracy, you also note that it brings legitimacy without changing the distribution of goods.? That is, if one?s goal is to change the distribution of wealth in a developing country, the results will appear disappointing and reflect poorly on direct democracy. But if one?s goal is to keep the distribution of wealth intact, the plebiscite system may offer a golden opportunity to do so while maintaining popular support.

Adding data points

Green also believes the issues raised by Olken?s study are ?not specific to Indonesia; they apply to all decentralized governments.? That said, Olken himself offers a few caveats about the experiment. Because it was a one-time study, he allows, the small councils, knowing their decision-making would be scrutinized by outsiders, may have made generous decisions in an effort to make themselves look reasonable. Such potential backroom dealing could not be accounted for in the study.

Olken also observes that the usefulness of direct democracy can be affected by the question of what is voted on in the first place; California?s ballot-proposition system, he notes, receives criticism for allowing well-funded organizations to set its agenda. Moreover, plebiscites that clearly benefit or hurt certain subgroups ? for instance, if a road were rerouted through existing property ? could become bitterly contested. ?Direct democracy can be very important in the right context,? says Olken. ?But the question is: What exactly is the right context??

Finally, Olken notes, ?elite capture? may well be a real phenomenon in other places, even if it seemed absent in these Indonesian villages. ?I don?t think we?ve disproven that elite capture is still a problem,? says Olken. ?But maybe in some cases elites are doing good things as well. We?re adding data points to the discussion.?

Institute honors Martin Luther King, Jr. at annual breakfast

Hundreds of members of the MIT community gathered Thursday at the annual breakfast celebration to honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and to reflect on the importance of using the Institute?s gifts to serve what President Susan Hockfield called the ?highest human purposes of connection, compassion and kindness.?

Titled ?Deploying Our Gifts for the Betterment of Humankind: What Would Dr. King Say About Us?,? the event highlighted the gifts?in the form of creativity, innovation and problem-solving abilities?that MIT bestows on its students, faculty and staff, and on the imperative that they be used for the greater good.

?MIT itself is a gift, one that we have a duty to use, in service to the world,? Hockfield told a crowded Walker Memorial. Still, much work remains in order to bolster the value of that gift, she said.

?As wonderful a gift as the Institute may be, intrinsic to its value, and our understanding of its value, is a perpetual striving to be ever better,? Hockfield said.

Keynote speaker Gerry Hudson, the international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, the country?s fastest growing labor union with more than 2.2 million members, echoed that call, imploring audience members to use their gifts to ?try to realize the possibility of a more just America.?

?Knowing what I know about the gifts in this room, if you put them on the table, we?ll get there,? said Hudson, who has been involved with MIT for about five years. Hudson recalled his work with J. Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and other MIT faculty and students in New Orleans on the rehabilitation of public housing after Hurricane Katrina?s devastation.

?The real King message?

In November 2008, Hudson and Thompson, as well as Joel Rogers of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and a number of national partners, including MIT?s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), co-founded the Emerald Cities Partnership to advance ?fair opportunity, shared wealth and democracy? in the nation?s cities, according to the organization?s website.

Hudson explained that although King inspired him to become a labor organizer, he had declined to speak at King celebrations in recent years because he did not recognize the King he ?knew and loved? in the speeches he heard at these events. Hudson agreed to speak at MIT because ?I think you get it, the real King message.?

Watch video of the 2010 MLK celebrations on TechTV

He spoke about King?s rarely quoted ?If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins? speech, given before an American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organization convention in 1961. During the address, King explained that his vision for America?s future was not only about civil rights but, more broadly, about freedom and jobs. Hudson believes it was the failure of the labor movement to respond to this speech and join King?s call to action that ?gave rise to an ugly politics that has swept this country for more than 40 years,? and that contributed to income inequality.

It was in 2008 when President Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party nomination that Hudson was persuaded that ?maybe, just maybe? his generation had picked up the baton that had been passed from King?s generation. A year after Obama?s inauguration, Hudson expressed frustration over what he said was a lack of progress on healthcare or labor law reform ? and made clear his belief that it takes more than a president to bring about significant change.

?I say to you, MIT, we need your gifts put out there one more time,? he said. ?It won?t happen unless you put them on the table.?

Building on a tradition of excellence

In addition to the speakers, Thursday?s breakfast featured passionate performances by the MIT Gospel Choir and Jermaine Tulloch, a guest soloist from the Harlem Gospel Choir.

Recent Rhodes Scholar winner Ugwechi Amadi, a senior majoring in brain and cognitive sciences and literature, moderated the celebration, which was dedicated to the memory of Leo Osgood, the former MIT basketball coach, associate dean and director of the Office of Minority Education who passed away in November. Hockfield praised Osgood for his commitment to the community.

?Leo was a guiding force behind this celebration for many years, and we are all very much the beneficiaries of his compassionate vision,? she said.

Citing that vision, the president stressed that there was room at MIT for improvement to harness the tools of modern technology and science to bring about more change. She called the recently released report from the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity a ?constructive tool? to help MIT fully tap into and strengthen its gifts, while upholding its nearly 150-year-old tradition of excellence.

The product of 2-1/2 years of research and analysis by a team of nine MIT faculty members, the report concluded that while MIT?s efforts to hire and retain under-represented minority (URM) faculty have produced some gains in recent years, the results are uneven across the Institute, and that more effective policies and practices are necessary. Moreover, the study said the experience of URM faculty at MIT can be different from that of their majority peers, and that MIT must do more to foster a culture of inclusion.

Hockfield said she disagreed with the notion that the report?s findings and recommendations might ?somehow threaten to erode or compromise the excellence of MIT.? asserting instead that the report ?is not about compromising those standards ? it is about reaching them.?

Hockfield praised the report for offering practical steps to accelerate positive change, and she noted that Provost L. Rafael Reif and Paula Hammond ?84, PhD ?93, the Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering who led the committee that prepared the report, have already begun strategy meetings with Academic Council, school councils and the heads of academic units.

In addition to the report and its recommendations, Hockfield pointed to another example of MIT using its gifts to serve the world, acknowledging the efforts of students, faculty and the Public Service Center in responding to last month?s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti.

One of those students, Dylon Rockwell, a junior majoring in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, spoke about his concern that even though he helped raise thousands of dollars through his involvement in MIT?s Jan. 29 Haiti Relief Benefit Showcase, it might not be enough.

?What would Dr. King say about me?? Rockwell asked. ?What would Dr. King say about MIT??

Zenzile Brooks, a graduate student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, spoke of another gift widely abundant at MIT: talent. She said she recently embraced her gift for playing the piano after an organizer from her church told her she had a responsibility to use that gift, much like King had a responsibility to use his gift to organize for change.

?You say thank you, and you use it,? Brooks said, noting that ?sparks really begin to fly? when MIT community members combine their individual gifts with the larger gift of MIT. ?We are obligated to put this gift to good, good use.?

3 Questions: David Mindell on Obama?s NASA proposal

In 2008, David Mindell, the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing; professor of aeronautics and astronautics; and director of MIT?s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, was the lead author of an independent review of the future of the U.S. human spaceflight program. Among the report?s many recommendations were that the nation set loftier goals for humans in space, focus research more clearly toward those goals and increase cooperation with other nations and private industry.

In an interview with MIT News, Mindell responds to the Obama administration?s recent budget proposal for NASA. The proposal would increase the agency?s budget but would cancel the Constellation program, which was intended to send humans to the moon by 2020, and would also rely on the commercial sector to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

Q. Some observers have said President Obama?s 2010 budget proposal marks the demise of U.S. human space exploration. Do you agree?

A. I don?t agree. First of all, we have to remember that humans have not been exploring space beyond low-Earth orbit for nearly 40 years already, so the so-called demise actually began in the 1970s. Moreover, the program that was canceled, Constellation, was simply not viable, financially and possibly otherwise. The Augustine commission reported last fall that NASA needed at least $3 billion more per year to achieve even modest goals in the next 20 years, and in this political environment there is no stomach for that. So the best it would have done would be muddle along, cost a great deal, and likely get people hurt along the way. The Augustine commission also laid out a ?flexible option,? which the Obama budget is seeking to follow, which makes for a more sensible, forward-looking policy, thinking in new ways about what constitutes exploration. Space exploration will certainly be different if this policy (i.e., budget) goes through. There will be more focus on new technologies within NASA, and the private sector is being ramped up in a big way to contribute.

In the history of American technology, it?s often been the case that the federal government tends to support radical new technologies (e.g. interchangeable parts in the 19th century, computers in the 20th century) for about 40 years to help them get off the ground before turning them over to the private sector to take hold. There?s a good case to be made that government-funded human spaceflight has grown conservative and bureaucratic; it?s time to see how private industry will do and what other models might work. We don?t know how well they?ll do, but we can only know by trying.  

Q. Under the proposal, NASA?s budget would receive an additional $6 billion over the next five years. Is this enough funding for NASA to meet Obama?s stated goal for it to focus on developing radically new space technologies?

A. It?s hard to tell in terms of absolute numbers; spaceflight is expensive, but $6 billion is a lot of money, especially when combined with whatever?s freed up from Constellation and from retiring the shuttle. There are a lot of exciting, practical ideas out there about operating in space, like learning to refuel on orbit and to fly autonomously, that are waiting to be tried. Constellation had short-circuited many such ideas in a rush to get something built. NASA had canceled essentially all of its advanced technology development work (both in-house and supporting places like MIT), eating its seed corn for Constellation.

Q. If Obama?s proposal is implemented, how different would NASA look five years from now?

A. The Obama proposal is a very clear statement that NASA should be an advanced technology development agency for spaceflight, not just a government-run airline for space or a manager of rocket-building projects. Moreover, NASA has been too hesitant to investigate radical combinations of human and robotic in its explorations, and this budget also will push the agency in those directions, which should prove very valuable. For example, a recent NASA press release mentioned the possibility of telerobotic rovers on the moon. In my opinion, it was simply ridiculous to talk about sending people back to the moon without first doing the best exploration possible with telerobotics. Look at what?s been done on Mars, where the time delays, available power, bandwidths and everything else are so much more difficult than on the moon. Yet I still can?t walk into my local science museum, or a lunar geology lab at MIT, and drive around a remote rover on the moon. In five years, we should be able to do that, and we should be able to send our students and our faculty on short, sub-orbital privately run flights for their research.

Record-breaking collisions

In December, the Large Hadron Collider, the world?s largest particle accelerator, shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions.

This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons ? a factor that will have to be taken into account when physicists start looking for more rarer particles and for the theorized Higgs boson.

?This is the very first step in a long road to performing extremely sensitive analyses that can detect particles produced only in one in a billion collisions,? says Gunther Roland, MIT associate professor of physics and an author of the new paper.

Roland and MIT professors Wit Busza and Boleslaw Wyslouch, who are members of the CMS (compact muon solenoid) collaboration, were among the study leaders. The CMS collaboration runs one of four detectors at the collider.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located underground near Geneva, Switzerland, started its latest run in late November. On Dec. 8, the proton beams around the 17-mile ring collided at a peak energy of 2.36 tera electron volts (TeV), breaking the previous record of 1.96 TeV achieved at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab. Because of Einstein?s equation, E=mc2, which correlates mass and energy, higher energy levels should produce heavier particles ? possibly including some never seen before.

In the new paper, submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics by CMS, the physicists analyzed the number of particles produced in the aftermath of the high-energy collisions. When protons collide, their energy is predominantly transformed into particles called mesons ? specifically, two types of mesons known as pions and kaons.

To their surprise, the researchers that the number of those particles increased faster with collision energy than was predicted by their models, which were based on results of lower-energy collisions.

Taking the new findings into account, the team is now tuning its predictions of how many of those mesons will be found during even higher energy collisions. When those high-energy experiments are conducted, it will be critical to know how many such particles to expect so they can be distinguished from more rare particles.

?If we?re looking for rare particles later on, these mesons will be in the background,? says Roland. ?These results show us that our expectations were not completely wrong, but we have to modify things a bit.?

Using the Large Hadron Collider, physicists hope to eventually detect the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to give all other particles their mass, as well as evidence for other physical phenomena such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions of space and the creation of a new form of matter called quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The new data provide an important reference point when CMS will look for signatures of QGP creation in collisions of lead ions at the LHC later this year.

The CMS team, which includes more than 2,000 scientists around the world, has 45 members (including faculty, students and research scientists) from the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science?s Particle Physics Collaboration and heavy-ion research groups.

The Large Hadron Collider is capable of creating collisions up to 14 TeV, but scientists are gradually easing the machine up to that level to try to avoid safety issues that have arisen in the past. In September 2008, the collider had to be shut down for several months after a connector joining two of the collider?s magnets failed, causing an explosion and leakage of the liquid helium that cools the magnets.

During the collider?s next run in March, researchers hope to create collisions of 7 TeV, says Roland. The success of the latest effort ?makes us extremely optimistic about the detector,? he says. ?It performed beautifully during the run.?

First germanium laser

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can produce wavelengths of light useful for optical communication. It?s also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature. Unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips. So the result could prove an important step toward computers that move data ? and maybe even perform calculations ? using light instead of electricity. But more fundamentally, the researchers have shown that, contrary to prior belief, a class of materials called indirect-band-gap semiconductors can yield practical lasers.

As chips? computational capacity increases, they need higher-bandwidth connections to send data to memory. But conventional electrical connections will soon become impractical, because they?ll require too much power to transport data at ever higher rates. Transmitting data with lasers ? devices that concentrate light into a narrow, powerful beam ? could be much more power-efficient, but it requires a cheap way to integrate optical and electronic components on silicon chips.

Chip assembly is a painstaking process in which layers of different materials are deposited on a wafer of silicon, and patterns are etched into them. Inserting a new material into this process is difficult: it has to be able to chemically bond to the layers above and below it, and depositing it must be possible at the temperatures and in the chemical environments suitable to the other materials.

The materials used in today?s lasers, such as gallium arsenide, are ?all tough fits,? says Tremont Miao, a marketing director at Massachusetts-based Analog Devices Semiconductor. ?They?re all challenging integrations.? As a consequence, the lasers have to be constructed separately and then grafted onto the chips, which is more expensive and time-consuming than building them directly on silicon would be. Moreover, gallium arsenide is much more expensive than silicon in the first place.

Integrating germanium into the manufacturing process, however, is something that almost all major chip manufacturers have already begun to do, since the addition of germanium increases the speed of silicon chips. ?We and lots of other people know how to do that,? Miao says.

Unchanneled energies

Gallium arsenide, silicon, and germanium are all examples of semiconductors, the type of material used in virtually all modern electronics. Lasers made from semiconductors convert the energy of electrons ? particles of charge ? into photons ? particles of light. Semiconductors come in two varieties: those with direct band gaps, like gallium arsenide, and those with indirect band gaps, like germanium and silicon. According to Jurgen Michel, principal research associate in the Electronic Materials Research Group and primary investigator on the germanium-laser project, ?There was an opinion in the scientific area that indirect-band-gap semiconductors will never lase? ? that is, produce laser light. ?That?s just what you teach in classes,? says Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, who leads the group.

In a semiconductor crystal, an excited electron ? one that?s had energy added to it ? will break free and enter the so-called conduction band, where it can move freely around the crystal. But in fact, an electron in the conduction band can be in one of two states. If it?s in the first state, and it falls out of the conduction band, it will release its extra energy as a photon. If it?s in the second state, it will release its energy in other ways, such as heat.

In direct-band-gap materials, the first state ? the photon-emitting state ? is a lower-energy state than the second state; in indirect-band-gap materials, it?s the other way around. An excited electron will naturally occupy the lowest-energy state it can find. So in direct-band-gap materials, excited electrons tend to go into the photon-emitting state, and in indirect-band-gap materials, they don?t.

Bridging the gap

In a forthcoming paper in the journal Optics Letters, Kimerling, Michel and three other researchers in the group ? postdoc Jifeng Liu, the lead author on the paper, and grad students Xiaochen Sun and Rodolfo Camacho-Aguilera ? describe how they coaxed excited germanium electrons into the higher-energy, photon-emitting state.

Their first strategy is a technique, common in chip manufacturing, called ?doping,? in which atoms of some other element are added to a semiconductor crystal. The group doped its germanium with phosphorous, which has five outer electrons. Germanium has only four outer electrons, ?so each phosphorous gives us an extra electron,? Kimerling says. The extra electron fills up the lower-energy state in the conduction band, causing excited electrons to, effectively, spill over into the higher-energy, photon-emitting state.

According to the group?s theoretical work, phosphorous doping ?works best at 10²⁰ atoms per cubic centimeter? of germanium, Kimerling explains. So far, the group has developed a technique that can add 10¹⁹ phosphorous atoms to each cubic centimeter of germanium, ?and we already begin to see lasing,? Kimerling says.

The second strategy was to lower the energy difference between the two conduction-band states so that excited electrons would be more likely to spill over into the photon-emitting state. The researchers did that by adapting another technique common in the chip industry: they ?strained? the germanium ? or pried its atoms slightly farther apart than they would be naturally ? by growing it directly on top of a layer of silicon. Both the silicon and the germanium were deposited at high temperatures. But silicon doesn?t contract as much as germanium when it cools. The atoms of the cooling germanium tried to maintain their alignment with the silicon atoms, so they ended up farther apart than they would ordinarily be. Changing the angle and length of the bonds between germanium atoms also changed the energies required to kick their electrons into the conduction band. ?The ability to grow germanium on silicon is a discovery of this group,? says Kimerling, ?and the ability to control the strain of those germanium films on silicon is a discovery of this group.?

?High-speed optical circuits like germanium in general,? says Miao. ?That?s a good marriage and a good combination. So their laser research is very, very promising.? Miao points out that the germanium lasers need to become more power-efficient before they?re a practical source of light for optical communications systems. ?But on the other hand,? he says, ?the promise is exciting, and the fact that they got germanium to lase at all is very exciting.?

Medical entrepreneurship, from the bottom up

A few years ago, Ashish Kothari thought he had found his life?s calling as a doctor. Raised and educated in Mumbai, the son of a doctor himself, Kothari graduated from medical school, became head resident at an Indian hospital and held valuable internships in Singapore and New York. Back in Mumbai, he established a private practice and helped it grow to five doctors and 30 staff members in three years.

Then in 2009, Kothari, an orthopedic surgeon, left his practice to study at MIT. Not because he was tired of helping people, but because Kothari believed he could help more people as a medical entrepreneur working to lower the cost of care in India.

?The difference between developed and developing economies is the way people are treated at every level of society,? says Kothari, who is pursuing degrees at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. ?Not just at the top, but how people are treated at the middle and at the bottom, and I firmly believe a basic level of medical care is something everyone deserves.?

As a result, Kothari is currently at Sloan formulating a two-part plan for making inexpensive medical tools and building low-cost clinics. In 2009-2010, Kothari is one of 16 fellows at MIT?s Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship, which promotes ?bottom-up? global development through technology. Two other Legatum fellows are trying to connect technology and medicine in India: Arjun Nair, who wants to create electronic medical records for India?s poor, and Murali Govindaswamy, who aims to increase forms of data-sharing over rural Internet networks.

?There is a large population in India that could benefit from medical innovations,? says Iqbal Z. Quadir, the founder and director of the Legatum Center at MIT. ?That?s why it?s important for all three of them to establish a sustainable presence there.?

When a knee costs an arm and a leg

These projects aim to affect a society where medical care reflects class divisions. At the high end, India has world-class doctors, clinics and technologies; the country has seen a growth in ?medical tourism? among patients who, for instance, travel to Bangalore, where a relatively pain-free type of heart bypass surgery was pioneered. Yet with a population over one billion, hundreds of millions of Indians could use better, more affordable care.

At MIT, Kothari, Nair and Govindaswamy are all rethinking the relationship between technology and medicine. In the United States, medical technology has often been associated with expensive new treatments. But as the Legatum Center fellows see it, technology should lower health expenses for the masses by refining existing treatments. ?There?s this huge void between the high-quality medical care available in the top 5 or 10 percent, and what is available at a price most people can pay,? Kothari says.

Consider Kothari?s surgical expertise, joint replacement. In India, an artificial knee costs $1,000 to $1,500. ?I think it?s possible to get that down to $500 to $750,? Kothari says, through local manufacturing (currently more than 90 percent of India?s implant parts are imported) and better engineering management. Kothari has recruited a chief engineer for his prospective company and would like to make many types of devices ? including diagnostic tools and sterilizing machines ? while starting modestly and ?growing as the demand grows.?

Indeed, the consulting firm Technopak Healthcare has projected that medical-sector spending in India will rise from $40 billion in 2008 to $323 billion in 2023 (without adjusting for inflation), thanks partly to India?s emerging middle classes. Inexpensive device-making, Kothari thinks, naturally helps affordable treatment and low-cost clinics become realistic.

Records for the poor

Nair?s project aims even lower on the socioeconomic scale: He would like to help people who cannot read the label on their medicine. ?The poorest of the poor are mostly uneducated, illiterate, don?t have access to drugs and live in the rural areas,? says Nair. ?It?s very hard for them to get educated about fundamental problems like tuberculosis or more chronic problems like diabetes.?

The first step, Nair thinks, is to create electronic medical records for them: ?You need to keep track of how a patient progresses over time. But that?s an enormous task in India because there?s no infrastructure for it.? Thus Nair wants to found a business to build a record-keeping infrastructure for rural health-care providers, ideally in his native state of Kerala, in southern India.

Govindaswamy, for his part, would like to develop data applications, to be used on the mobile devices sold by Nokia in India, that would let rural residents send and receive medical data. ?If you break down the information barrier using mobile phones, that can help in areas like health,? says Govindaswamy.

Being at MIT also helps the Legatum Center fellows connect with local entrepreneurs. One model for Nair?s project is suggested by Innovators in Health, a Cambridge-based firm that developed a ?smart pillbox,? a mobile device that reminds tuberculosis patients to take their drugs. ?It?s extremely hard to monitor what?s going on in the field,? says Innovators in Health co-founder Manish Bhardwaj, PhD ?09, whose company has roots in MIT?s International Development Initiative. Of Nair?s idea, he says, ?Electronic medical records are the kind of thing that can help a good program to reduce costs.?

Think global, start local

Innovators in Health currently participates in projects in Delhi and the Bihar region. That kind of scale, Nair observes, is ideal. ?If you start at the higher level, it?s an enormously capital-intensive project, and it?s not going to happen,? says Nair bluntly. ?So it has to be localized; then you can build up.?

Quadir, who founded Bangladesh?s largest telephone company, Grameenphone, supports that philosophy. ?That?s the nature of bottom-up development: it builds on small, initial success,? says Quadir. ?Then other people can invest, and a project can become bigger. That?s why the Legatum Center encourages projects that can become commercially viable. Through local innovation, if you deliver more efficiently, the opportunities are enormous.?

Of course, the Legatum Center fellows face high hurdles before their ideas become viable enterprises. Bhardwaj, for instance, recommends that health startups become partners with nongovernmental aid organizations in India ? which financial backers almost always require.

?A lot of people have narratives of technological transformation,? says Bhardwaj. ?But investors are looking for reliable partners on the ground. You have to manage challenges from infrastructure to finding the right way of hiring and training workers. If an organization has everything else functioning, then it?s primed and ready for computerization.?

Whatever obstacles they face, these Legatum Center fellows are all making the same trip from India to MIT and back, in order to help others. ?Being a doctor is wonderful, but I wanted to try something different,? concludes Kothari. ?My father?s practice always treated people independent of socioeconomic concerns. You only need to be sick for two days to realize how much it affects you, so think about people who are unwell all the time. I?d like to do something for them.?

Q&A with Simon Johnson

Over the last two years, Simon Johnson has become America?s most outspoken critic of the banking industry. Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has consistently argued that the United States has the same problem today that he encountered in smaller countries as former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund: The political ?capture? of government by the financial lobby. In Johnson?s view, this means the U.S. government has, among other things, spent large sums of bailout money on financial institutions they deemed ?too big to fail,? but without getting banks to lend the capital that could help kick-start the economy.  

Today, with financial-reform legislation a leading topic on Capitol Hill, Johnson is testifying before the Senate Banking Committee about the state of the industry ? a topic he also dissects further, with co-author James Kwak, in his forthcoming book ?13 Bankers,? due out in March. Johnson spoke with MIT News on Wednesday.

Q. The Obama administration has recently proposed restrictions on the size of banks. What is your view of their ideas, and what chance do they have of becoming law?

A. These proposals don?t go far enough. The size restrictions should be tougher, but that has basically no chance of passing the Senate right now. What I see as being really up for grabs here is mainstream consensus opinion about what are safe banks, and what are dangerous banks. Big Finance has gotten out of control and needs to be reined in, but it?s only really going to happen once reasonable people change their minds about what is too big to fail.

Q. But if you were involved in these congressional negotiations and could choose just one element of reform to include in legislation, what would it be?

A. I would amend the 1994 Riegle-Neale Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, which said no bank can have more than 10 percent of retail deposits in the United States. Two problems have become apparent since 1994. First of all, a lot of the action for banks is not in retail deposits, it?s in so-called wholesale financing, financial companies lending to each other. That?s where banks became a lot bigger. Secondly, that cap wasn?t enforced because we had some regulators who were very laissez-faire, or just lazy, and so Bank of America, Chase, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo all received waivers on that size cap. You need a different cap that reflects changes in finance. I would cap bank assets and liabilities as not more than a small percentage of Gross Domestic Product, and set that percentage so the banks go back to the size they were in the early 1990s, when the banking system worked fine and we didn?t have anything like our current levels of systemic risk. That seems like a completely reasonable proposal. And I would enforce the cap. The regulators have to wake up.

Q. We?re living with 10 percent unemployment. At what point do economic conditions themselves alter this mainstream consensus view, about the value of the financial industry?

A. The big question is whether real change can come without a major depression. Because it?s just astonishing in Washington to see the presumption among lobbyists that it?s business as usual, since we didn?t have a Great Depression. That?s really shocking and discouraging. But the mainstream consensus has changed before in big ways. In 1902, when Teddy Roosevelt decided to take on the trusts, nobody thought that was a good idea, and nobody thought it would work. Yet by 1910, or 1911, everybody thought the trusts were bad for society, and had to be broken up ? even Standard Oil was broken into 35 or so pieces, all of which were quite viable and most of which turned out to be extremely profitable. I think that what we?re looking for is a change in views similar to what Teddy Roosevelt achieved.

Q. What do you think of the White House?s performance on banking issues?

A. I voted for President Obama and like him and wish him well, and we do try to make constructive suggestions to his people both in private and on The Baseline Scenario. I think he?s pretty much at this point established himself on these issues as a conventional centrist, not a radical reformer, contrary to what people thought they heard him say. I don?t know if President Obama is the person who is going to do this. I don?t know if the person who will do it will eventually come from the left or the right. It will probably be someone with more of a maverick streak in him or her. Now, mavericks come with other attributes, so be careful what you wish for. But conventional thinking is not going to get us out of this, it?s clear. We?re in far too deep and the corporate banking lobby is far too powerful.

Q. You?ve started advocating a ?move your money? initiative to get citizens and politicians to transfer their funds to smaller banks. What might that accomplish?

A. It?s about changing people?s attitudes and opening people?s eyes to the behavior of the financial sector and the big banks, who often don?t treat you well as customers, let alone in terms of what they do to the economy. So when people look carefully, they often find small banks are better. I banked with a small bank in Cambridge for 20-some years, and in D.C. I?m with a credit union, and it?s terrific service. And I?ve had three mortgages, from the same people I keep my money with, very good interest rates, and if there?s a problem you call up and you talk to someone right away, they don?t mess around with you. Even if we?re looking at a decade to change attitudes, those can change, and I think they will change. That?s the good thing about American society and American democracy.

Powering cube satellites

Right now, 10 to 15 Rubik?s Cube-sized satellites are orbiting high above Earth. Known as cube satellites, or ?CubeSats,? the devices help researchers conduct simple space observations and measure characteristics of Earth?s atmosphere. One advantage is that they are relatively cheap to deploy: While launching a rocket may cost between $50 million and $300 million, a CubeSat can ?piggyback? onto a large rocket platform at an additional cost of as little as $40,000. But their small size also means they lack on-board propulsion systems, which is why they generally remain locked to a particular orbit.

That could soon change, however. Paulo Lozano, the H.N. Slater Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, is designing a tiny propulsion system that could allow the satellites, which weigh about a kilogram and are used for tasks that don?t require precise orbit control, to travel great distances and perform more serious tasks, such as searching for planets outside our solar system. The technology, which is based on the process of extracting and accelerating charged ions, or atoms that have gained or lost an electron, could make CubeSats much more useful for organizations or countries that until now have had limited access to space.

For decades, the only way to get objects into space from Earth ? and then propel them through space ? was to use chemical propulsion systems. But the systems require a lot of propellant, or fuel, and haven?t been miniaturized to the scale appropriate for a CubeSat. By changing the design from chemical to electric, and to one that relies on a simple power supply, Lozano has created a system that produces more efficient thrust ? the force created when mass is accelerated in a certain direction ? than that produced by a chemical-based system, which produces a low thrust per gram of propellant. About the size of a computer chip, the mini-thruster design also overcomes the size constraints of chemical propulsion and other forms of electric propulsion because it does not require a bulky chamber to burn (chemical) or extract ions from (electric) the propellant. Although other electric propulsion systems have been developed, Lozano?s is considered superior because it uses only one power supply.

With funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lozano has been developing the technology to make the mini-thruster. The Air Force and other government agencies are interested in using CubeSats that can move between different orbits in space, and more specifically, that have the propulsion required to reenter Earth?s atmosphere and destroy themselves at the end of their mission (thereby keeping them from becoming ?space junk?). The thruster design requires that the total volume of the propulsion system be less than 10 percent of the CubeSat.

?The goal is to have a space engine that leaves plenty of room for the payload, or cargo, of the CubeSat,? Lozano said. Certain missions require chemical propulsion, such as a trip to the moon, because in order to land on the moon?s surface, the amount of force from the engine must be at least equal to the weight of the lander, a value that Lozano said is generally ?way too high? for electric propulsion engines. But chemical-based systems are severely limited by the fact that the vehicle mass must be made mostly of propellant, which leaves little room for the payload. Quite often the propellant must also be stored in a pressurized container with thick walls and pipes, further limiting the payload size. Although other electric propulsion systems exist, they require a pressurized container to store the propellant.

Vadim Khayms, a systems engineer at Lockheed Martin, explained that most electric propulsion systems haven?t been scaled to operate at very low power levels and are typically suitable for larger satellites that have more power available and require more thrust. He is not aware of another electric propulsion system designed for CubeSats. ?You probably couldn?t use any other existing electric propulsion [systems] on these very small satellites,? Khayms said of Lozano?s design.

How the power system works

Lozano?s design relies on electrospraying, a physics process that uses electricity to extract positive and negative ions from a liquid salt that is created in a laboratory and serves as the system?s propellant. The liquid contains no solvent, such as water, and can be charged electrically with no heat involved. Whereas other electric propulsion systems charge the ions in a chamber on the satellite, the ionic liquid in Lozano?s design has already been charged on the ground, which is why his system doesn?t need a chamber.

Electricity is then converted from the main power source of the CubeSat, typically batteries or a solar panel, and applied to a tiny structure roughly the size of a postage stamp. This thin panel is made of about 1,000 porous metal structures that resemble needles and have several grams of the ionic liquid on them. By applying voltage to the needles, an electric field is created that extracts the ions from the liquid, accelerates them at very high speeds and forces them to fly away. This process creates an ionic force strong enough to produce thrust.

Whereas chemical rockets waste too much propellant to reach a net change in spacecraft velocity, electric thrusters can do exactly the same mission using just a small fraction of the propellant. The only difference is one of time: Although electric propulsion is very fuel efficient, it is slower due to power limitations.

?Eventually, you?ll run out of propellant, but that is the benefit of electric propulsion because it accelerates so fast that you don?t need a lot of it,? he said. ?No other electric propulsion system would be so compact and efficient at the same time.?

Because the mini-thrusters are scalable, thousands of them could be built into long, thin panels to produce thrust for a much larger spacecraft that requires low, but steady, acceleration. ?There?s no impediment to making a whole table of them similar to a solar panel,? Lozano said. ?This gives you a lot more flexibility in what you can do.?

Lozano predicts that CubeSats using this technology will become a reality in less than three years. He plans to have a prototype of the mini-thruster in four to five months and hopes to begin testing it to measure performance metrics such as the velocity of the ions and their energy to figure out the force produced by the engine. Knowing this, researchers can estimate its efficiency. After Lozano delivers a prototype this year, his team will look for additional support to turn the design into a flight version.

CRTs going down the tubes? Hardly

Many people may assume that conventional television sets and computer monitors ? the kind that use picture tubes (technically known as cathode ray tubes, or CRTs) rather than flat panel screens ? have virtually disappeared from the market, like buggy whips and 8-track cassette tapes. But a new MIT study reports that demand for these devices is still greater than the supply of old discarded CRTs, whose glass is recycled to make new ones.

The demand comes mostly from the world?s developing nations, where inexpensive TV sets using CRTs are one of the first luxury items people tend to buy as soon as they have a little bit of disposable income. CRT television sets ?are still absolutely the cheapest way to get a first TV,? says Randolph Kirchain PhD ?99, associate professor of materials science and engineering and engineering systems and co-author of the new study. ?That?s an early purchase one makes as one moves up the income ladder.?

Sales of CRT television sets peaked in 2005 at about 130 million units worldwide, and declined to about 90 million last year ? almost all of those in Asia and Latin America, where sales stayed roughly constant and are expected to remain so for several years. Virtually all of these CRTs are now manufactured in Asia. Sales of CRT computer monitors peaked around 2000 at about 90 million units, but have already declined to near zero.

Because the glass used in CRTs contains a substantial amount of lead ? used to block X-rays produced by the tube?s cathode ray gun to keep them from posing a health risk to viewers ? the old tubes can potentially pose risks to human health if simply dumped in landfills. In some places, including most European nations and Japan, they are included in a category of electronics waste that must be properly recycled, but recycling requirements in the United States and most of the rest of the world are inconsistent, or nonexistent.

As a result, the study found that in terms of recycling glass from old CRTs to make new ones, ?the amount of new glass required is decreasing, but is much greater than the amount of secondary glass collected, which is increasing.? That balance, the authors found, ?is sustainable for the foreseeable future.? In other words, manufacturers wanting to use the recycled glass can count on having a supply, and recyclers can count on finding a market for the old tubes, for many years to come.

Kirchain says the study was partly an attempt to develop a more general method for analyzing the flow of materials through the whole chain of production, use and disposal or recycling. ?Our interest is in understanding how to make a materials system function in a healthy manner,? he explains, ?both for economic benefits, and to minimize the environmental burden. We saw this as an interesting test case,? partly because it deals with a commodity that is gradually being phased out. ?We wanted to see how materials systems evolve over time.?

The biggest issue in recycling CRTs is the imbalance in the centers of supply and demand. Most of the old CRTs being disposed of are in the United States and Europe, whereas the greatest demand for the material for making new CRTs is in Asia. But because glass is a low-value commodity, ?the farther you have to move it, the less likely it is that the market drives the transaction,? Kirchain says.

Fortunately, there is one other use for the recycled glass ? as an additive in smelters used to produce metals. ?Any kind of smelter will use silica [the main ingredient in glass] as a flux, to separate out anything in the mix they don?t want,? says Jeremy Gregory SM ?00, PhD ?04, a research scientist in MIT?s Materials Systems Laboratory and lead author of the new study, published in the December issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology. In some smelters, he says, the operators are willing to use old CRT glass as a flux material, although they generally charge the suppliers for taking it off their hands. If the plant is producing lead, the lead-laced glass can actually add to the lead produced, although the amount is very small, he says.

In Europe, with its strict regulations requiring electronics waste recycling, CRTs represent by far the biggest category of such material being collected, though e-waste is only 1 to 2 percent of the overall waste stream. But because of its lead content, it is one that merits attention, Kirchain and Gregory say, especially since much of it gets shipped from the industrialized world to developing countries where there are fewer regulations regarding its disposal and the protection of people exposed to it.

Ruediger Kuehr, head of the operational unit at the United Nations University?s Institute for Sustainability and Peace, says that this academic study can provide important advice for both industry and government regulators because ?those entities are often focused on short-term and short-sighted issues, and do not have the luxury of taking a broad systems-wide, hence holistic, view of an issue.? He says this study is ?quite useful in considering what should be done with all of the materials that are a byproduct from recycling, particularly when it is not clear there is demand for the recycled materials.?

The study, Kirchain says, underscores the need for manufacturers to consider the full lifecycle of a product and try to plan ahead for recycling and repurposing of devices that have outlived their original function. Such issues will continue to gain urgency, he says, as new products enter the market, for example the vast number of new batteries that would be required for a major shift toward electric vehicles. ?There?s a lot of interest in driving the new technologies,? he says, ?and very little in finding something useful to do with them at the end of their life.?

Engineering a new way to study hepatitis C

Hepatitis C, a virus that can cause liver failure or cancer, infects about 200 million people worldwide. Existing drugs are not always effective, so many patients end up on long liver-transplant waiting lists.

One reason that no better treatment options exist is the lack of a suitable liver tissue model to test new drugs in the laboratory. But now, researchers from MIT and Rockefeller University have successfully grown hepatitis C viruses in otherwise healthy liver cells.

In the new tissue model, liver cells are precisely arranged on a specially patterned plate and surrounded by supportive cells, allowing them to live and function for four to six weeks. The cells can be infected with hepatitis C for two to three weeks, giving researchers the chance to study the cells? responses to different drugs.

?With this model system, one can study hepatitis C and its chronic effects in greater mechanistic detail,? says Salman Khetani, former MIT postdoctoral associate and an author of two recent papers on the work. ?Since it uses normal human liver cells rather than cancer-derived ones, our system may provide a better understanding of how hepatitis C progresses in humans, and of potential cures.?

The research team, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and MIT?s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Charles Rice of Rockefeller University, reported the new method in recent papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Biotechnology.

Patterning cells

Previously, researchers have been able to induce cancerous liver cells to survive and reproduce outside the body, but those cells are not sufficient for studying hepatitis C because their responses to infection are different from those of normal liver cells.

To create their new model, researchers used healthy liver cells that had been cryogenically preserved and grew them on special plates with micropatterns that direct the cells where to grow. The liver cells were strategically interspersed with other cells called fibroblasts that support the growth of liver tissue.

?If you just put cells on a surface in an unorganized way, they lose their function very quickly,? says Bhatia, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. ?If you specify which cells sit next to each other, you can extend the lifetime of the cells and help them maintain their function.?

Not only did the researchers successfully grow cells infected with hepatitis C, they also developed new ways to confirm that the viruses have entered cells and replicated themselves. Those techniques, reported in the Jan. 31 online edition of Nature Biotechnology, could allow drug developers to more easily test potential new drugs.

To test whether viruses have entered cells, the researchers engineered hepatitis C-like viral particles to express a fluorescent protein that glows when the virus goes into cells. That could help researchers test potential drugs that block viral entry into cells, by allowing them to see whether the virus has made it into the cells or not.

They also developed a test that reveals whether hepatitis C viruses have successfully reproduced inside an infected cell. Such a test would help researchers test the efficiency of potential drugs that block viral replication.

In these studies, the researchers used a strain of hepatitis C isolated from a Japanese patient with severe hepatitis, the only strain ever successfully grown in the lab. They hope to modify the system so they can grow additional strains, including those commonly found in North America, which would allow for more thorough drug testing.

Raymond Chung, director of hepatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, says the new model represents a significant improvement over existing tissue models, derived from liver tumors. With this new technology, researchers should be able to get a more accurate picture of virus-host interactions and the effectiveness of viral inhibitors, he says. They could also gain insight into why hepatitis C persists as a chronic infection in the majority of patients. ?This model allows us to really get at these issues in a more bona fide way, using real viruses and, for the first time, real liver cells,? he says.