He's infuriated because, despite the hype, the TED talk and the Gates funding, it's not clear why this is better than other simple microscopes which can be made for even less money. Also, why does it need to be so cheap? Not everyone in a poor community needs one of these. Surely they could buy/receive a more conventional instrument and share it.

"other simple microscopes that can be made for even less money"

What microscopes are cheaper? It seems incredibly hard to beat this on price without sacrificing a lot of magnification or durability.

By trading off field of view, eye relief, brightness and aberrations you can get any arbitrary magnification by sticking in a different sized plastic ball lens. Just like all the 500x junk telescopes that are sold.

Given all the attention this is getting, I have to conclude that I'm missing a critical element of what makes this notable. I get that it's very cheap and can be stepped on, but maybe you can explain the application for this that wouldn't be better served by the shared use of a more conventional design made out of plastic instead of paper and which could still survive rough handling.

The paper vs plastic issue is unimportant, in my opinion. In fact, the latest designs I've seen are made of polypropylene sheets instead of paper sheets.

I think the critical element is that it's cheap to build and ship.

Again, what microscopes do you know of that are cheaper?

I do like one thing, this has the potential to inspire kids about optics. I sure would have loved to have one growing up!

These point of care services aren't limit by the cost of the microscope, they are limited by staff and the cost of histology. Most of the scopes I see at the clinic are cheap brightfield ones used to look at stained specimens, and are kept as backups when the Beckman-Colter machine fails. Can your microscope distinguish white blood cell morphology? Working with live cell imaging you learn that red-blood cells are evil because they carry no detail and little information, they are trivial to see and deconvolve. You can see relevant features even if you are beyond the diffraction limit, but then again you need those fancy slides that spread the cells out so that you can inspect them one-by-one.

I see no new science and an attempt to address non-existent problems and seems way out of touch with the needs of medical staff. The test for malaria looks something like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/PLDH_Mala... http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_H...

tldr: We knew you could do this hundreds of years ago, it won't change the world because it didn't then.