>> "Pathways to Invention" is made possible by The Lemelson Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling the next generation of inventors to improve lives around the world, and the foundation's InventEd initiative extends its mission and promotes the value and impact of invention education in K-12 classrooms across the United States, helping educators foster inventive mindsets and skill sets in students nationwide... >> And by Berkeley Engineering, where our public mission drives societal change, empowering creative minds, imagining the impossible, innovating for the greater good.

Learn more at engineering.berkeley.edu.

>> So, what do you think?

Are inventors born or are they made?

>> Nature versus nurture?

>> Yeah.

Yeah.

♪♪ [ Ferry horn blows ] >> Inventors don't care so much about what other people say or what society says.

>> Science allows you to be creative, solve problems.

♪♪ >> The best way to get an idea is to put yourself in an environment where something is hindering you from accomplishing your goals.

>> There are all kinds of problems to be solved in the world, and sometimes, you just need the right problem.

>> Hey.

>> Inventors are naturally curious.

>> A problem solver.

>> They put together these puzzle pieces.

>> Pushing the boundaries.

>> Giving it 110%.

>> Doing something that's frightening or uncomfortable.

>> Until you get something that works.

>> And change the world for the better.

>> I knew that my parents gave me the genes.

We also know that the environment in which you grew up in can take that thing away from you or can help nourish that.

>> I think some people are born just with naturally inquisitive, creative minds and, like, love problem solving and... >> We all are born curious.

We like to study the world.

We like to understand it.

We like to stick a fork in a power outlet sometimes or touch a hot pan and burn our fingers.

That's that innate curiosity that we all have, and sometimes, it's environmental factors that drive it out of us.

>> My parents were really a great example of that selfless hard work and dedication it takes to give someone else a better life.

So growing up, I always knew that I wanted to do something that was going to impact the world and help people if I could.

>> You see someone at a specific point in their journey and you assume they were always that way.

>> Yeah.

>> But really, like, you had to work yourself in from day one.

>> I feel like anyone can make it, even if your foundation is not strong.

>> At some degree, you have to have some aspect of persistence and drive within that comes just innately.

But from there, I think a lot of what can be learned just from who you work with, from who's around you, from who is giving you advice can really lend itself into -- I don't know -- shaping your own thought processes and how that can convert your ideas into inventions and into creations.

>> We're working on a prenatal blood test that can predict risks during pregnancy early.

>> A tampon-sized imaging device for cervical-cancer screening.

>> A disinfectant that would be blue.

So once the color fades fully from blue to clear, decontamination is done.

>> We're using voice recognition so, that way, we can identify when a piglet is in distress and autonomously save that pig's life.

>> We embed little programs inside of a plant.

>> A 3-D-printed device, and the structure mimics that of the normal eardrum.

>> A social enterprise in Uganda where we're locally recycling the plastic waste.

>> There's a lot of conditions that prevent a normal usage of hands.

Our goal is to create a technology to allow them to do what they think is not possible.

>> Inventors like problem solving.

There's a challenge?

Great.

I don't know.

Let's -- How do we do that?

What if you do this?

What if you do that?

How come?

But why?

I think inventors are dreamers.

>> Mommy, how would you describe your cooking style?

Follow the rules?

Traditional?

>> I like original recipes.

>> Yeah?

And what does Dad like?

What does Dad do?

>> Dad never follows an original recipe.

He invents as he goes.

>> You remember that time he added orange juice to a cake, and then the cake wouldn't bake?

[ Laughter ] But, also, you have to give him credit, Mommy.

Most of the time, it tastes pretty good.

>> Yeah, still bothers me.

>> I really love cooking.

I feel like it's a great creative outlet where you get to put flavors together and see how they meld.

Any other spices right now?

>> No, no.

And don't ask.

No.

>> Of course you put cayenne pepper.

>> Don't... >> It tastes good.

A little spicy because I added some cayenne.

Yeah, I know it's Dad.

I added the spice, though, so it's me.

>> A little is good.

Add pomegranate molasses, then we go.

>> And just like in science...

Okay.

...in the face of failure, you find something and you change it.

And my parents tried to teach me the same things -- that I shouldn't be afraid to try stuff.

>> A bit more.

For every invention, you have to be open to failing and confident in your ability to learn.

[ Piano playing ] >> The first time I had the desire to invent something was in elementary school.

My little sister was just born, and it was my job to sit by her baby stroller or her carriage and just hold a bottle and feed it to her.

And I remember I started thinking around that time, "This is a really annoying and boring job."

So I had this early idea to make a baby-bottle holder out of what was, at the time, a light fixture.

So if you can imagine unscrewing the light bulb and then being able to screw in a baby bottle.

I remember I had come up with a couple concept sketches and I showed my teacher, and that was probably my very first time inventing, and it came out of pure necessity, because I no longer wanted to be in charge of feeding my sister.

>> My first love as a kid was art.

And then, during high school, I got really interested in math.

Math provided this language where you could start describing things in new ways, and engineering is a realm where you can mathematically describe the way things work.

I started to fall in love with the programmability or potential programmability of living things.

That got me interested in really tiny things and the potential to embed little programs inside of a plant.

Not only are humans full of microbes, but every plant in the world appears to have microbes living inside of its tissues, too.

Human microbiome is a term to describe the community of microbes that live inside of a human, inside our G.I.

tract, surface of our skin.

For a long time in medicine, we've treated those microbes as either neutral or bad.

And the whole while, they've had an incentive to keep their host alive, because if their host dies, they're probably done for, too.

And so that provides a motivation of sorts for microbes to have figured out ways to keep their host alive in any way that they can.

The reason that's profound is because it could potentially be a more natural, safer, and more effective way of improving our food system.

The fascination with microbes living inside of us led to Indigo.

>> Our process here at Indigo starts with harvesting plant samples from growers all across the world and finding plants that are growing well under stressed environments and plants that aren't growing well under stressed environments.

And what we essentially do are harvest those plants, send them here to Boston, and then process them on equipment like this that allows us to understand the consortia of microbes that may be impacting that plant's health and then pulling them out of that environment and then storing them in a small vial that we store in a freezer that allows us to preserve those microbes forever.

So, essentially, once we find a microbe or a number of microbes that work against a particular crop, like cotton, on a particular indication, like water stress, we start developing a process to manufacture and produce those microbes at a much larger scale that we could then treat a particular grower's seed, plant that seed, and that microbe helps that plant, effectively, be more efficient with the water it gets today and produce more yield with less water.

Of course, that only starts in a vessel this size.

This is about a liter.

But we can develop the process here and the formulation such that this replicates a much larger-scale commercial manufacturing, where we could produce hundreds of thousands or millions of acres.

The difference in terms of yield is about twofold.

This is meant to mimic a soil environment.

We've got a treated one here.

And you can see one that's been untreated, where we actually haven't even germinated yet, whereas the treated one has already germinated and looking real good.

>> We built the Indigo mission around maximizing the sustainability of farming, the profitability to growers, and the quality of foods that come out of the largest chunks of our food system.

That opened the door for a bunch of additional innovations and technologies.

♪♪ >> I guess you can set out the path to become an inventor, but I think sometimes, there's a little bit of luck, to me, in all of life that you've got to be at the right place at the right time, and then there's a bit of one's own personality that you have to be open to taking risks.

And even if it doesn't work, you learn a lot along the journey.

When I graduated college, this lab that I joined, they had gotten to the point where they knew that RNA molecules that are present in a mom's blood change over the course of pregnancy, but whether those had a clinical impact, whether you could use those changes over the course of pregnancy to predict risks during pregnancy, that was a big question mark.

And the more I dug into it, the more questions I had and the more things I wanted to understand.

It's important to ask why things are the way they are and can we make them different?

That's a really important skill.

The three blood tests predict three things -- time to delivery, risk of pre-term birth, and risk of pre-eclampsia.

In the world of women's health, maternal and fetal death are still a huge problem.

But as prominent cases, when they go into the clinic and they describe their symptoms, oftentimes, they get ignored, and the healthcare system turns away from them.

I think we can envision a world where a mom comes in early during pregnancy and a doctor takes a blood sample and there's a census of all the things that the mom is at risk for.

In addition, you could monitor fetal and maternal organ health.

How's the liver doing?

How's the heart doing?

How's the brain doing?

Great.

The next visit, is the liver, the heart, and the brain still doing well?

Have we seen some deviation?

To me, it's a world of care where you have the needed information to make informed decisions and you have that early.

>> A lot of people don't know that disinfectants actually have a contact time to work.

So if anyone's ever used a Lysol bottle before, if you look at the back of it, it says you need to let that sit wet on a surface for at least 10 minutes to disinfect something.

Now, I have never done that, and I don't think anyone ever has.

But in healthcare situations, if you're not waiting the requisite 3-to-5-minute contact time for bleach, you're not killing anything, and that can be the difference between life or death.

So, the idea is that you insert this cartridge that is full of our Highlight fluid and then you press this button, and it will dispense a wipe.

When you wipe it, the color will fade based upon a rough approximation of the contact time of the disinfectant.

So once the color fades fully from blue to clear, decontamination is done.

In 2015, we actually took like a month off school in our senior year.

My first team on Kinnos were my two co-founders, Jason and Kevin.

We went to Liberia at the height of the Ebola crisis and worked with healthcare workers that were, you know, still there working with live Ebola virus.

[ Indistinct conversation ] So, when people are spraying you down at the end of the day, what are you thinking about?

"I want to get out of this suit as soon as possible."

So, what we were seeing were lots of doctors and nurses were getting infected at higher rates because of improper decontamination.

So, there's a patient in the room.

The room needs to be cleaned before someone else walks in, but the room has not been effectively cleaned, and that can be the difference between life or death.

>> Studying science back in Ghana, I realized that perhaps I could actually have a bigger impact by developing tools that could be used for diagnostics to help solve health problems, and this was important to me because I had had family members and friends pass away from undiagnosed conditions.

So I really went down this path to develop tools to solve challenges.

I had wanted to work on technology that could impact global health settings.

If you catch it early, cervical cancer is extremely preventable.

It has a very simple treatment.

But each year, about 500,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer, and more than half of them die.

About 90% of the deaths are occurring in low- and middle-income countries, because greater than 60% of women are not being screened.

So that's where I came in and started working on what is now called the Callascope.

The idea behind it is to have a tampon-sized imaging device for self-imaging to allow for assessment of infections or cervical cancer or other reproductive-health issues.

The Callascope can be used right by connecting it to a mobile phone or a computer via USB.

With the Callascope, you're actually able to insert the camera, and we really see this as something that women all over the world could purchase and use in the comfort of their homes.

As a student, it can be very difficult to think of yourself as an inventor, and I think that's because I kind of held invention at this high-to-reach place.

For instance, I was just looking at the definition of an inventor from an online dictionary, and how it's very open -- someone who invents something or makes something.

They also give an example of Thomas Edison, who died years ago.

So it kind of makes you think inventors are people who are Thomas Edison-like, must have created something that completely changed, you know, the whole world, like the light bulb or -- >> That's exactly right.

For students and inventors today, we need to break the mold.

There is no one mold for what an inventor looks like or creates.

Breaking the mold and letting children particularly know that you can be an inventor no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your education level.

It starts with creation, and anybody can create.

>> I came from a public high school in Saudi Arabia.

Nothing to stimulate students' creativity or anything like that.

No science competitions, nothing.

And if you just have it in you to just say that, like, you know where you're supposed to be and that you can do so much more and you believe in yourself -- >> It's so true.

And I felt like I heard that so much growing up, but I felt like it took me a long time before I actually, I guess, kind of realized what that meant.

And the thing is, like, the will as manifested by, like, a constant work and not giving up, like, actually working towards the things that you want to do.

And it's very easy to -- when you just see success stories, to think like, "Oh, man, they got the good idea.

Like, I just need to come up with my good idea."

It's not just about the good idea.

They say ideas are cheap.

It's about, like -- >> Putting in.

>> Uh-huh.

It's about putting the time in.

>> As a child of immigrants, I saw, like, two worlds.

I saw, like, my parents' Lebanese world and the other worlds that I grew up in, and so nothing was "normal," per se.

And so you could -- It encouraged you to question stuff.

That's what I'm trying to get at.

And because you questioned stuff, then you could see like, "Oh, this could be better or we could fix it instead of just saying like, "This is the way the world has always been," you know?

>> Yeah.

The world is not perfect.

There's so many problems.

And at the end of the day, like, fundamentally, I, like, want to make things better.

>> Yeah.

>> I feel an obligation to leave the world better than I found it.

>> The more we share these stories with people, the more people will feel like they can be an inventor, because, like, when I look at Mark Zuckerberg's story or Bill Gates' story, those stories, again, aren't relatable to me, because, like, I couldn't have gone to Harvard and then just dropped out and started a company, right?

>> Right.

>> But stories that are relatable to me are, like, other female inventors that I've met who, you know, got their PhD, worked two jobs, started a company.

That company failed.

They started another company.

That company failed.

And finally, like, they've been able to start a company that's gotten some funding.

I think those stories are also really inspiring because you can see yourselves in them.

>> Yeah.

>> Just now, people from all different backgrounds of life, of all different ages, from different races are inventing things.

Why don't we highlight them in the dictionary instead of consistently using Thomas Edison?

>> Right.

♪♪ >> Hey.

>> I think I remember the first time meeting was actually through you kind of introducing me to the world of microcontrollers.

You were showing it to me, and I just had no idea what this tiny, little computer was.

And sure enough, later that night, you were hooking up little sensors and motors, and I was like, "Hey, we're gonna be friends probably for a while."

>> Most people in computer science tend to be very -- >> Studious.

>> Very studious and -- >> Bookworms.

>> Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that we're also bookworms, but it's important to find people that share similar -- >> Interests.

>> Yeah, interests and vibes.

>> Multifaceted, you know?

A little bit more beyond just the coursework.

>> But I think that -- I think I've said this in the past.

We are in distinct frequencies, but we are in phase.

>> That's right.

>> Which is important.

>> That's right.

>> We converge at certain spots, and that's where the... >> Both: Magic happens.

>> I was gonna say that.

[ Knock on door ] >> Hey, hey!

>> Hey, Chris!

Bring it in.

>> Come on in.

Good to see you.

>> Good to see you, too.

>> Welcome back to the Invention Lab.

>> The Invention Lab is a maker space, prototyping space that's essentially open to any student that would like to join.

It's open to less-experienced users, and so it can be a great source of exposure, like as it was for me.

>> Corten, remember I used to sleep on this couch every night?

>> Many, many nights.

Chris, one thing that we were talking about earlier, the concept -- very philosophical -- nature versus nurture.

What do you think as it relates to becoming an inventor?

Is that something you're born with or is it something that you learn or is it a little bit of both?

>> It's a little bit of both, but you are born with it.

Kids are inventors.

You know, the issue is you grow up.

So, kids will pick up something and say, "This is a megaphone.

This is a submarine."

Adult picks it up and say, "Ah, this is a brick.

You know, we -- As adults, you identify everything or you categorize.

You know, you have to have that wonderment of a child.

Like, "What if?"

You know, "What could be?"

And imagination.

[ Pigs grunting ] >> This one's still sleepy.

Look at that.

He's just like, "I'm going to sleep.

It's a no-bones day for the piglet.

[ Laughs ] My family has been involved with the swine industry for the past three generations -- my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my dad, and now I am, as well.

As a pork producer, when I would be in there with the piglets, nothing was more frustrating than walking there in the morning and finding dead pigs that I would have to pick up and remove from a healthy mother and a healthy litter.

I'll never forget walking in.

There was one morning I walked in at 4:00 in the morning to check on these pigs before school, and a mom had laid on eight of her babies.

Eight.

Only four were left alive.

And, so, I remove all the dead piglets and I go do some work, come back, and she laid on two more.

And to me, I was so angry and frustrated that these healthy little pigs died because we didn't have a heads-up on the mother or a way of saving them when we weren't there.

And that is ultimately when it came to my mind that I have to solve this problem.

The problem of piglet crushing is the largest problem we have as pork producers today when it comes to mortality.

About 160 million pigs die each year worldwide from their mothers rolling on them during the birthing process.

[ Pig squealing ] >> We're using voice recognition to identify the wave forms and frequencies of each and every one of the pig squeals so, that way, we can identify when a piglet is in distress and autonomously save that pig's life.

>> The way SmartGuard works is, it has two parts.

The first part is identifying that squeal.

How can we, through technology, identify a pattern that we could actually build an algorithm around to kind of detect that piglet squeal?

Now, it communicates to the second part, which is a wearable.

>> Right here, what we can see is this wearable that goes into its charging port.

We'll actually take that out and we place it right on the sow's side.

>> And they communicate via Bluetooth.

What the wearable does is gonna basically deliver an impulse to the sow to cause a reaction.

>> It's about 1/4 of a dog collar to alert the sow to just switch over just enough to let the piglet run free.

So, in this way, these pigs have 24/7 protection all day long.

[ Pig squealing ] We met at Hawkeye Community College and transferred to the University of Iowa together and lived together for the first few years.

Then we went on a Christmas break our junior year, and my dad had said, "Hey, have you ever thought about pursuing that idea you had about a solution for piglet crushing?"

And just a few days later, the university sent out this e-mail about an opportunity to win $3,000.

>> We talked on the phone and then we actually took a napkin and kind of started drawing things up on how we thought we were going to solve this.

It was a no-brainer of, "Okay, let's sit down, let's solve this," and then you just started moving forward from that.

♪♪ >> Pizza party.

>> I do think the best inventions come from people that have knowledge in a broad variety of categories so they can, like, bring problems in from one area into another and kind of, like, combine things.

>> What can make an invention strong is the voices and input of a diverse array of people.

>> I think collaboration is absolutely key, because no individual is going to have all the expertise in any -- all the areas needed to make a successful invention.

I think our team is great because we have such a diverse set of skills.

It's great working with the surgeons, as well, because they provide invaluable input.

It causes a lot of head-butting amongst the team, I know, as well, but I think that's good, as well, because I think it's needed.

>> Yeah, and I think it's important to have friends, but friends you're okay working with, that you're okay having arguments with, and, you know -- [ Laughter ] You guys are awesome.

Collaboration has been really important to our team, and that's really why we've sought out so many different skill sets.

Everyone on our team, from, you know, Devin, who has an industrial-design background, Nick, who is a PhD, Mischa, who has a business background, really all coming together into this and solving a problem, because what we're trying to solve is complicated.

♪♪ >> Those fiber structures.

TM layers.

>> Normal.

>> TM.

>> Yeah, that one.

Perfect.

Most of my inventions so far have been in the ear and hearing space, based on my collaborations with surgeons during graduate school.

And one thing that stood out really was Dr. Remenschneider's experience dealing with patients from the Boston Marathon bombing.

[ Explosion, screaming ] >> Troops with the Massachusetts National Guard were among the first on the scene after two powerful bombs exploded yesterday near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Officials now say at least three people were killed and more than 140 others wounded in the blast.

>> He saw that a lot of patients from this event suffered from chronic eardrum perforations.

And, essentially, what he was able to see is that a lot of these patients didn't have ideal outcomes following eardrum-repair procedures.

And it frustrated me, because I was like, "Why is such a simple problem so complicated, just to fix a hole in your eardrum?"

So, since I was in a lab that did materials science and 3-D printing, we began thinking about how we might be able to design better materials that could be 3-D-printed to regenerate the eardrum.

And so this is really what led to this collaboration and led to the invention of PhonoGraft.

PhonoGraft is a 3-D-printed device made from a unique biodegradable elastomeric material.

What this means is that your native cells can grow onto the graft and begin to remodel it into tissue that looks like this printed architecture.

Instead of a patient going in for eight or more hours into the hospital, they could potentially have a surgeon open PhonoGraft from a sterile package, instead of harvesting tissue, and place it through the ear canal in a 20-minute clinic setting.

And so this is really exciting because we're pushing the boundaries not just in healthcare, but thinking about, you know, how these materials and manufacturing methods might actually innovate other industries and encourage people to think more creatively and smartly about how they're designing new products.

>> This is where I really first learn about the importance of a collaboration between a clinician like myself, who has a lot of problems, because I see a lot of patients with problems, and many of the things that we do don't always work, and an engineer like you, who's been able to, like, really focus on a specific problem and come up with concrete solutions.

You pushing me to think new, creative ways about how to do the procedure, perhaps in a less-invasive way, and me pushing you, as well as everyone else on the team, to try and come up with materials that had the right properties so that I would like to get it out of the package and want to put it in a patient and have it be much easier.

♪♪ >> I feel like one of the hardest things that we've done is actually not only starting this company, but also dating while we were doing it.

I remember sometimes, we'd, like, bring our fights into work, and it'd be super-awkward for Kevin, our third co-founder.

>> We would be arguing about something at home, and then, when we'd get to work, we're still arguing about that, but under a new proxy battle.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> That was chaos, honestly.

Like, I honestly feel like, you know, your prefrontal cortex doesn't develop till you're 25, and we just, like, weren't mature enough to really separate those things until we got older, but -- >> But I think even now, there are, like, a lot of difficulties working together.

I think being co-founders of the same startup, you're both just so constantly stressed by the same exact problem.

I think we're often in a position where I'm trying to hide my stress, you're trying to hide your stress, but we're both, you know, like, freaking out silently.

>> Yeah.

>> Where do you see the future of...

It's difficult to start a company with your friends.

You're going to fight a lot.

Money's going to come into the discussion.

It's going to be awkward.

There's a lot of complexities in that relationship.

But I think what Jason and I were able to do was, number one, whatever happens at work, don't take it personally.

At the same time, number two, be very honest with one another.

>> [ Grunts ] >> [ Laughs ] Get mad.

>> [ Grunts ] >> First year and a half, it was literally just Tomás and myself trying to figure everything out together, and it was overwhelming at times.

Yeah?

Push through it still.

Push through it.

>> Thankfully, my co-founder is here to support me.

In those moments where I want to surrender, he's here.

Thank you, Corten.

>> That's true.

But, recently, we are officially a four-man team with a couple of part-time workers and a handful of interns.

And now we don't have to do everything ourselves and are definitely experiencing a lot more progress.

At the very least, Tomás, you were mentioning that one option would be a botched board where we swap the I.C.

out of the other.

Is this the same profile of the I.C.s, of the other one?

>> No, but a bodge means, like, wiring it with magnet wire, yeah, yeah.

Which is doable.

>> Essentially, we have rendered a random non-useful garage into a space where we can do all of our hands-on prototyping, our 3-D printing, our electronics.

So, yeah, this row, this row, and some of those.

>> Very -- I think it is very doable.

>> Okay.

>> Very, very teeny.

And last but not least, my favorite component of our lab garage is the Pink Poopie Pipe.

Custom made.

It's magnetic, so I can just put lots of things here.

>> Once we embed this bad boy with sensors, we can really start to track the digestive patterns of our employees, because, you know, we really want to make sure all our employees are happy, healthy, fit, and ready to work.

>> This is a dream job.

[ Laughter ] [ Toilet flushes ] What we're working on right now is a mouth mouse, which is a smart teeth retainer that lets people with severe motor impairment control computers without hands.

>> Pop this in.

I can manipulate the device with my tongue.

I can press on it to get the pressure to change.

And the motion sensors can detect my head movement and bites.

With our tech, we can understand the breathing patterns of the user.

We're also looking at how this device could be used as a general-purpose, like, health-tracking type of device, looking at particularly ways in which our device can help diagnose people living with sleep apnea or other nighttime conditions.

>> We hope that, in the next few years, our system can be in the mouths of those who really need it.

>> Failure.

People talk about failure.

Failure doesn't exist.

>> There's this old vaudeville joke -- it takes 20 years to become an overnight success.

I think inventing is a little bit like that, and science is like that.

You're banging your head on the wall for a long, long time.

Then, all of a sudden, the breakthrough happens, whether it's discovery or invention, and everything accelerates.

>> We have had a million setbacks and obstacles.

I honestly cannot even begin to list them all.

>> It's so easy and so common that things will go wrong and break and fail.

>> Don't be afraid to fail.

>> If you're willing to flinch and give up, you might as well just go home from the very start.

>> Nobody knows that something's going to succeed when they started.

It's a question of, "Well, I'm going to try, and we'll see what happens."

>> We'd go to these competitions, and there would be Stanford and Harvard and MIT.

And here we are from Iowa, grew up a pig farmer.

>> You have to push on when people say it's not going to work or, like, that you're crazy.

>> You have to filter the noise.

Otherwise, you're not going to succeed.

>> You need to be willing to break things and figuring out how to dig yourself out of the hole you got yourself into.

>> I've had at least a dozen moments of me saying, "This is not going to work."

>> We had a working product, we changed nothing except these contacts, and, all of a sudden, it didn't work.

>> You fail and then you think of how you can do it a different way.

>> Peaks and troughs and peaks and troughs.

>> You keep trying and trying and trying.

>> It's not gonna be done right the first time.

>> Print again.

>> Probably not gonna be done right the second time.

>> Print again.

>> Fail, fail again.

>> And again and again and again.

>> And just not giving up.

>> It always becomes a process of not like, "This one has to work," but "If this doesn't work, what can we do from there?"

>> The ability to get kicked and to get back up and to say, "You know what?

I'm going to figure out how this works."

>> As an inventor, as a curious person, you are faced with people telling you it doesn't work.

"This is never going to work."

And it's important that people understand that if one way doesn't work, another way could.

♪♪ >> When I was graduating, thankfully, I was able to spend almost a year living in a village in Northern Uganda working on this Fulbright research project.

I learned a lot about building in an off-grid setting, where you don't have access to electricity.

I got to experience living in a Ugandan village and, like, living in a mud hut and fetching water every day and washing your clothes by hand and just got to experience what it's like for the majority of the world to live, like, their lives every day.

The plastic-waste situation in Uganda is a really big problem.

Uganda produces 600 tons of plastic waste every day, and most of it is not collected.

Primarily, the plastic waste in Uganda is burned, which, of course, releases lethal carcinogens, toxins, all kinds of greenhouse gases.

In the U.S. and, like, Europe, P.E.T.

is actually really good for recycling, but the process to recycle it is a super-industrialized, like, massive scale, capital-intensive process.

And so no companies in Uganda can actually recycle the P.E.T.

We needed a local solution where the plastic could be processed and recycled in the same community without long-distance transportation.

>> We started from a really basic concept, with some chemicals we bought from Amazon, and we made the initial prototype in one of our co-founder's fraternity houses.

I thought, "If anything, this is a really cool project.

If this could be used, that would be incredible."

But what ended up happening was, the chief medical officer of the Fire Department of New York reached out to us and said, "Hey, I want to demo this product."

And so a fire truck picked us up at school, drove us all the way down to Staten Island.

We get there, they're demoing the product, and the first time they sprayed it, it actually wasn't working at all.

It was completely clogged.

There was no blue.

And I'll never forget the silence of all those firefighters just standing there and watching our complete fail of a product demo.

And that's when I thought, "This is really embarrassing, and I missed my chance."

But the fire department actually returned to us and said, "Hey, we'll give you some time to fix this, and let's ask you to do another demo."

The issue was actually it was winter in New York, so, actually, the bleach froze and it wasn't even coming out.

So we had to improve the product to kind of prevent that kind of freezing.

And so as more and more momentum build, as we, you know, received a grant, we started, you know, getting seed funding, that all helped build my confidence as an inventor, but it also made me feel a lot of imposter syndrome, in the sense that I didn't feel like I was smart enough or good enough to be given that title.

I think the word, like, "inventor" can be very intimidating to people.

Like, I definitely also feel very shy to say like, "I'm an inventor."

>> I feel like, if anything, I'm, like, a contributor.

And I feel like a lot of science is usually framed that way.

Everyone is contributing different things that culminate to the launch of a successful product.

>> Hey, Peter.

>> Hey, Paige.

>> Good to see you.

>> Good to see you, too.

How is Berkeley?

>> It's pretty good.

Yeah, it's nice today.

How's Gulu?

How is the office today?

>> Gulu is pretty good.

Yeah, Leah's been super-busy with the new... >> Peter is my co-founder of Takataka Plastics, and his background was in I.T.

and, like, computing.

We realized we had a lot of the same ideas and goals of using waste as a resource to be able to improve the environment, but also, like, create jobs.

We're actually creating a recycling system that currently does not exist in Uganda.

When I would talk to the established, like, super-experienced plastics engineers in the U.S., they'd all say like, "It's not going to work.

Like, there's no way."

But we tried anyways, and it worked, to everyone's surprise.

We've designed this locally made machine that you pour the shredded plastic into the injection machine, and it melts it.

And then we -- Ours is manually operated, so you you spin the wheel, and it pushes the plastic into a mold.

And then, as it cools, then you can open the mold and remove the part.

So just by changing the mold, we can make all different kinds of products, whether it's, like, the wall tiles or mask inserts, coasters.

The plastic is super-versatile, in that you can make so many different things from it.

I remember the first time we made a tile from recycled plastic.

It was, like, a terrible day.

Like, so many things had gone wrong.

And, like, the power went out, and just we were staying super-late in the office.

And we were just, like, all trying to get this machine to work.

And finally, it started turning and started melting the plastic.

We took it out and tried to, like, to break it and, like, dropped it on the floor, and it didn't break.

And we were like, "We did it.

We did it."

That was a really special night.

>> Back in childhood, I think my path was very much directed when I was in Ghana, because you do science and you go to medical school, so I didn't really have to think too much about all the different options I wanted to get involved in.

Whereas now, there's so many things I want to do because I want to make an impact here and I want to make an impact there and... With a baby, it's been hectic.

[ Laughs ] I think the first three months were probably the hardest.

But perseverance can overcome any challenge.

♪♪ >> In high school, I thought science was boring.

It seemed to me that everything had been solved in science, at least the way they taught it in schools.

It was this, like, closed book.

There was no mystery to it.

This is how you do stuff.

That's the end.

And math was the same way.

And writing, you could imagine stories, and that's the part of science that I love -- the imagination bit, the solving mysteries, like, putting pieces together, kind of like a detective and, with that, the impact on human health.

One of my grandmas had pancreatic cancer and passed away fairly quickly after the diagnosis, because, often, you don't detect it until very late.

And to me, there was a lot that could have been done there.

So when I graduated high school, I decided that I really wanted to help people, and so I wanted to be a medical doctor.

And went to college, and I really liked the questions that they were asking in the bio classes, that you could set up these experiments and figure things out about the world and that those experiments then led to inventions that impacted human health.

>> What color do you think the soil is?

What do you think?

>> Um, white.

>> White?

Let's see.

That's an interesting guess.

>> Ooh!

Look like crystals.

>> I see.

You were talking about the ice.

>> Geoffrey didn't learn to read till he was 8.

>> There are a lot of happy plants around here.

>> But he did rig up a pulley system in his room to automatically open and close the doors, turn on and off the lights and the stereo system.

And our whole house was really a booby trap for any potential visitors who might come.

In the meantime, I read a lot and I realized that he did think in very imaging ways and he did also have an aural way of understanding.

And he did have a certain way of understanding people that seemed more sophisticated than his years very early on.

>> Geoff is like a pathological inventor.

He's always thinking laterally about, "How does this connect to something I've seen?

How can it be different?

Should it be different?

Maybe not.

And why does it work this way?"

>> So, this soil has a lot of carbon in it.

That's why it's so dark.

You know where that carbon came from?

>> Where?

>> The sky.

Plants have this amazing ability to grab carbon dioxide from the sky and build themselves.

I can see in their eyes the way that I felt when my dad would talk about stuff as a kid.

Just sort of like, "Done."

>> Roger Scruton, the now-deceased philosopher from the U.K. -- he talks a lot about the sacred versus the desecrated, and in life, there's only those two things.

And so when you do something, you're doing something sacred or you're desecrating something.

And, so, since I've been at Indigo, that's how I view farming.

When I go out there, am I doing something sacred?

Am I replenishing the soil?

Am I doing something good for the water that's going to come off my farm or am I doing the opposite?

Am I desecrating?

>> At Indigo Carbon today is the potential to not only decrease emissions, but to, in fact, reverse some of the emissions that we've put into the atmosphere, historically.

There are uncountable numbers of moments where people were willing to believe in me, willing to support me, and I've had really special mentors who have really shaped the way that I think about the world and the role that I can play in trying out new things.

>> Most interesting question have no answers.

>> Start with something that's just brand-new and then figure out how that breakthrough... >> The degree to which we can intellectually jump as humans is far greater than what we've been led to believe.

And in a weird way, it starts with belief.

I love the notion that we use in English, but don't really think about, which is the notion of a leap of faith.

And, so, a leap of faith is not a religious concept.

The leap of faith is the notion that you can make a major leap and you have some faith that you're going to land in a safe way.

Well, that turns out to be a pure act of imagination.

It's a form of courage.

That is the lesson over and over here -- just leap and then figure it out.

>> I think, to inspire the next generation of inventors, that's super-important.

>> When you recognize that you have the ability to invent and you give yourself permission to invent, it creates almost an empowerment where you're not intimidated saying, "Oh, but I'm not an inventor."

No, you say, "Bring it on."

Don't let anything stop you.

>> So, what do you think?

Are inventors born or are they made?

>> Well, they have to be born first, and then they can be made.

>> Inventors are born.

Inventors are made.

Inventors like asking questions.

Inventors don't take "no" for an answer.

>> If someone tells me that they're not an inventor, I tell them, "You are an inventor."

Think about the problems that you want to solve, celebrate yourself, learn, build this library, and get out there and do.

>> I thought so many times in this Highlight journey like, "Someone smarter would do a better job.

Someone who knows more chemistry would do a better job."

But I think, you know, as long as you have a passion for something, you can learn anything you want.

>> As a parent, when your kids come home or when you went home as a child and you showed your parents the report card and you had three A's, two B's, and a C, what did the parents focus on?

The C. What should we focus on?

Probably the three A's.

The three things that our children are excelling at that we want to keep feeding into, because that's what they're going to be great at.

Yeah.

You good?

>> I think inventors are made in the process, that you have to continually keep asking questions and be curious and -- >> Yeah, I think, you know, always wanting to make -- not taking your environment for granted, you know, and giving back to a system that's given you so much.

And for me, that's been really intellectually fulfilling and personally fulfilling, as well as hopefully eventually will be good for other people, too.

>> Follow what you are passionate about and don't listen to those who tell you that you can't, because when you are doing something you love, it's no longer a task, it's no longer tedious, but it's a pleasure.

>> When your passion is tippy-top for something, it motivates you in ways that are surreal.

>> For young inventors, I'll always say to follow your passion and know that they can do what they set their minds to.

>> Everyone's journey is different.

Inventing his really taught me to be persistent.

Inventing has taught me to be creative.

Inventing has taught me to trust myself in a way that I wouldn't have trusted myself before.

It's okay to be imperfect so long as you're better than you were.

We can invent things, we can invent products, we can invent services, we can create new capabilities, we can create new knowledge, but, at the end of the day, what we're really doing is reinventing ourselves.

♪♪ >> Chart your pathway to invention.

Our website has more stories and tools to spark your inner creator.

Find extended interviews and learning resources for all ages.

Start inventing -- pathwaystoinvention.org.

♪♪ "Pathways to Invention" is made possible by The Lemelson Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling the next generation of inventors to improve lives around the world, and the foundation's InventEd initiative extends its mission and promotes the value and impact of invention education in K-12 classrooms across the United States, helping educators foster inventive mindsets and skill sets in students nationwide... >> And by Berkeley Engineering, where our public mission drives societal change, empowering creative minds, imagining the impossible, innovating for the greater good.

Learn more at engineering.berkeley.edu.