One lab’s trash becomes a poorer one’s treasure

When Nina Dudnik arrived at Harvard Medical School in 2001 to pursue her doctorate, her eyes weren’t drawn to the marble hallways, the state-of-the-art facilities, or the august faculty.

They were drawn to the trash.

Dudnik came to Harvard from Ivory Coast, where she had worked for a year in what passes there for a science lab, a facility where she spent much of her time rewashing test tubes and scrounging up basic supplies. It is the kind of stuff that labs all over America toss out routinely.

Why not, she wondered as plunged into her own research that fall, find a way to connect the throwaways of this country to the needs of scientists in the Third World?

Read more here (The Boston Globe)