ACS MEETING NEWS
C&EN profiles Chemists Without Borders, the humanitarian chemistry organization CELIA HENRY ARNAUD, C&EN WASHINGTON
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t all started with a letter published in Chemical & Engineering News and an error in translation. In September 2004, Bego Gerber wrote a letter in response to a story that mentioned a carbohydrate vaccine for typhoid that was languishing for want of a company to produce it. In that letter, he urged chemists to take up the cause of the vaccine to help get it commercialized. “Could this be our ‘Chemists Without
themselves organized, the vaccine that inspired Gerber’s letter was being manufactured by a company in India. So they went looking for other projects. Chambreau wanted to focus on clean drinking water in Bangladesh, where much of the groundwater contains high concentrations of arsenic from surrounding geological formations. The organization has branched out from there with a project for developing green chemistry educational materials and lab kits for schools in Sierra Leone and another for ensuring safe pharmaceuticals in Africa. And they are doing this on a shoestring budget funded mostly by the growing organization’s membership. CWB remains small but is growing rapidly. The organization’s only paid staff member is the Paper analytical devices can identify program manager potentially adulterated or fake drugs in Bangladesh. from their color bar codes. Everybody else is a volunteer. Approximately 700 people Frontiers,’ à la ‘Médicins Sans Frontières?’ ” have signed up to be on the organization’s he wrote, incorrectly translating the French mailing list, but only about 50 are directly name of the organization Doctors Without involved in projects. Many of the members Borders. The rest, as they say, is history. have never met in person. They meet virtuSteve Chambreau contacted Gerber and ally via twice-monthly conference calls that asked, “Don’t you mean Chemists Without all members are welcome to participate in, Borders?” Of course, that’s what he meant, Gerber said. The members of the individual and together they decided to start such an project teams meet regularly by Skype. organization. Volunteers from the organizaCWB’s most mature project is about safe tion, Chemists Without Borders (CWB), de- drinking water. As part of that project, the scribed its activities at a symposium sponorganization has constructed two wells that sored by the Division of Analytical Chemprovide clean drinking water to about 4,000 istry at last month’s American Chemical students at high schools outside ChitSociety national meeting in Philadelphia. tagong, Bangladesh. The first one was built By the time Gerber and Chambreau got in February at Sitakunda High School. The
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | SEPTEMBER 12, 2016
other was installed at Teriail High School in June. The wells cost about $2,500 each. “It costs very little per student, only about $1.25 per student for the wells we have constructed so far,” Ray Kronquist, the current president of CWB, told C&EN. And, he pointed out, those wells will provide clean water for years. The organization is now trying to identify at least eight other schools to provide wells for. It is also looking for individuals or organizations who would like to sponsor the well project at those schools. Besides well-building, the group is educating students in Bangladesh about the hazards of arsenic in drinking water. By targeting students, CWB hopes to reach their families, as well. The program provides water filters, test kits, and training to high school students in affected areas. Volunteers developed and validated the testing protocol, which has been translated into the Bengali language. As part of the arsenic project, CWB is trying to produce “penny per test” kits for measuring arsenic. Chris Lizardi, a chemist at ChemTel Inc. and a volunteer with CWB, described the project at the Philadelphia symposium. The arsenic test is based on the Gutzeit-Marsh reaction, in which zinc and sulfamic acid convert inorganic arsenic to arsine gas that then reacts with mercuric bromide crystals on a test paper to give a yellowish-brown color. The current cost is about $0.48 per test. The ultimate goal is
Chemists Without Borders at a glance ▸ Year founded: 2005 ▸ Mission statement: “Chemists Without
Borders solves humanitarian problems by mobilizing the resources and expertise of the global chemistry community and its networks.” ▸ Number of members: ~700 on mailing list; ~50 active volunteers on projects ▸ Annual budget: Ranges from ~$5,000 to $15,000 ▸ Projects: Clean drinking water in Bangladesh; chemistry education materials in Sierra Leone; safe pharmaceuticals in Africa
CREDIT: BARBARA JOHNSTON/UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
Nearly all-volunteer group achieves big impact in developing world with shoestring budget
$0.01. The next step is putting together a ment of affordable lab experiments based pilot study in which students at the Asian on green chemistry principles. The team University for Women in Bangladesh make is putting together lab kits based on the and use the test, Lizardi said. microscience techniques commercialized In addition to arsenic in water, CWB is by Radmaste Microscience, a South Afrialso concerned about arsenic in rice. The can company. Each kit will include all the source of the arsenic in rice varies with materials for the experiment and manuals location. In some places, it’s a naturally ocfor the teacher and students. For example, curring contaminant in the water. In other one kit lets students use an indigenous places, it comes plant to purify from previous water, Kanu told uses of the land, C&EN. such as indusIt is currently try or cotton estimated each farming. kit will cost $75, Julian Tyson, and the number an emeritus of kits needed professor at the for a class will University of depend on how Massachusetts, many students Amherst, is work together heading up the in teams. The arsenic-in-rice current goal project. He is is to have 12 to working with 15 activity kits undergraduates Students collect water from the new well at ready to go by at UMass to deTeriail High School in Bangladesh. next September. velop a detection The group anmethod based on commercially available ticipates reaching 200–500 students and test kits that use the Gutzeit-Marsh reaction. teachers in approximately 50 schools each Arsenic is easy to extract from rice with year. A Global Innovation Grant of ACS, just hot water, Tyson said. But the resulting which publishes C&EN, has helped fund starchy mixture hinders the test kit. Tythe education project. son’s team is taking two approaches to imCWB also provides support for a project prove performance—switching from zinc that was started, and continues to be run, to borohydride and using dialysis to sepaindependently of the organization. The Parate arsenate and arsenite from the starch. per Analytical Device Project, led by Marya Although the water and rice projects are Lieberman of the University of Notre Dame, currently running in parallel, Tyson anticigets its funding from outside sources. pates adopting the penny-per-test method CWB publishes updates about the project for rice as well. in its newsletter and helps with recruiting But CWB is working on more than dealpartners. ing with arsenic contamination. The orgaLieberman develops inexpensive devices nization launched a project in Sierra Leone for screening pharmaceutical products for in response to an e-mail exchange between adulteration or falsifiGerber and Khadarlis, an organization cation. She collaborates operating in the nation. As part of that exwith hospitals in Kenya, change, Gerber asked people at Khadarlis which send secret shopwhether there were any chemistry-related pers to pharmacies to problems CWB could help with. The anpurchase available drugs. swer was “were there ever!” he told C&EN. The hospitals analyze the The Sierra Leone education project, drugs with paper devices which is now led by A. Bakarr Kanu of Winstamped with reagents ston-Salem State University, is intended for colorimetric assays. to help rebuild the country’s education Each card has multiple lanes, each with system after the destruction wrought by its the reagents for a different reaction, so a decadelong civil war. The project is develgiven drug produces a color bar code charoping inexpensive kits to jump-start chemacteristic of its chemical composition. If istry education. In addition to imparting the bar code differs from that for a known fundamental chemical knowledge, the team standard of the drug, the drug is flagged for members are working to include informafurther testing. tion that’s relevant to the everyday lives of But the paper devices can only screen ordinary Sierra Leoneans, Kanu said. the drugs. Suspicious samples need to be A key part of the project is the developsent elsewhere for confirmatory analysis by
high-performance liquid chromatography. For those analyses, Lieberman has enlisted a network of labs across the country, especially at small colleges, for distributed pharmaceutical analysis. Lieberman has an established standard operating procedure for the analysis. Partner schools have to test their equipment to ensure the devices are suitable for those procedures. Demonstrating system suitability is a good real-world activity for undergraduates taking instrumental analysis, Lieberman said. If the system passes, the lab can start receiving and analyzing samples. Although her work is independent of CWB, Lieberman benefits from the connection. “My work with paper millifluidics is focused on solving problems in the developing world, but I don’t want to put a lot of work into designing a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, or a solution that is not implementable or scalable,” she told C&EN. “Participating in CWB helps me to meet people from the developing world and learn about their problems, resources, and constraints. It helps me to keep my science real.” At the symposium, Ephraim Govere, a soil scientist at Pennsylvania State University and a native of Zimbabwe who is not affiliated with CWB, reminded the audience that cultural differences can be real impediments to the implementation of CWB’s various projects. And those cultural differences can be within a single country. For example, he said, many countries in Africa have multiple regions divided by geography and culture. If people from the outside aren’t aware of and aren’t sensitive to those differences, they can do as much harm as good. Gerber takes the challenges of “cultural competence” to heart. “We lost a valuable relationship with a Bangladeshi adviser owing to our lack of understanding and awareness,” Gerber told C&EN. “Despite one’s constant sensitivity to these issues, it is not difficult to appear like a bull in a china shop. That’s why we do as much as we can through local people.” Gerber has big dreams for the organization. At the symposium, citing an estimate from the International Labour Organization, Gerber pointed out that as many as 20 million people worldwide work in chemistry. He views them all as potential participants. “The potential to solve problems is enormous,” Gerber said. “There are 20 million of us in the chemistry community, plus all the people they know. Imagine if we were all mobilized.” ◾
CREDIT: CHEMISTS WITHOUT BORDERS
“Participating in CWB ... helps me to keep my science real.”
SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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