Reaching for the ‘moon’, our time is now.

On May 25^th, 1961 John F. Kennedy laid out a vision for the USA to land an American on the moon and safely return him/her back to earth. JFK realized that landing on the moon was not as important as setting a bold vision that would capture all America’s attention to strive for greatness and not settle for mediocrity.

In his now famous “Man on the Moon Address”, JFK stated, “Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.”

It has been almost 50 years since JFK provided a vision for which all Americans and the world’s citizens could look towards as an example to better themselves, albeit in school, at work, or the global community.

Is there not a better time than in 2010 to set such a bold and focused vision once again for America? After almost a decade of zero economic growth and job creation, with unscrupulous business practices on Wall Street that brought our economy to the brink, it is time to raise up and strive for a better future for our children and children’s children.

Today, one in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children who live in poverty. Furthermore WHO estimates that almost 50% (1 billion) of all children on this planet (2.2 billion) live in poverty. Of these children over 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

While not as potentially captivating as putting an American on the moon, I suggest we strive to find a way to set bold goals to eliminate childhood poverty, and ensure that all infants under five years of age receive adequate nutrition by 2030.

JFK believed that innovation in science, business, medicine, and education is not the byproduct of a few privileged members of our global society, but rather an outcome of all the world's citizens efforts to reach their potential through equal opportunity and by breaking down the barriers that cause poverty, tyranny, and illiteracy. Let us once again rise up and take on these challenges through bold new goals and vision in 2010 and beyond.

Importance of Development Partnerships

Recently there has been in influx of interest in the development of low cost medical devices for resource poor and developing country settings. This has spurned a great deal of passion and interest by students, faculty, and partners to develop prototypes and send teams for short stays to document future requirements as well as tweak existing designs. Examples of ingenious devices/products from the fruits of many hours of careful design and development have ranged from pill boxes to urine strips for monitoring ingestion of life saving medicines.

However, it is critical to incorporate these activities into a framework for proper testing and evaluation to ensure safety and efficacy of programs prior to human subjects testing. A challenge in developing markets is porous oversight, especially in rural communities to monitor pilot programs and report on results. Additionally, while international standards exist for good clinical practice, the cost of adhering to such standards is not tenable in many developing markets without further direct investment.

The good news is there are some world class clinical and laboratory infrastructures in place that have been developed due to large investments from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and center for disease control (CDC). However these structures have primarily been focused on infectious diseases, vaccine development, and surveillance activities. Rarely have these existing platforms been available to the social entrepreneur trying to innovate.

New methods for partnership and investment are required to transform the existing landscape to better serve the bottom of the pyramid. Such investment will create a platform to support the development of a well vetted pipeline of innovations in global health practice.