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 |  Breast cancer will strike more than200,000 women in the United States this year. And 40,000 will die. X-ray mammography is the best way to detect early tumors, but the technique misses one in five cases, and women find the test uncomfortable. Susan Hagness and collaborators have invented a better breast-imaging technique.A woman lies on her back so that her breasts flatten naturally, and an instrument Hagness is developing scans the breast tissue with very-low-power microwaves, which are safer
than x-rays. Hagness's preliminary measurements on breast biopsy specimens indicate that microwave imaging makes malignant tumors stand out better than x-rays do. The energetic Hagness developed sophisticated computer algorithms—which process data collected by the imaging instrument—to enhance the detection and discrimination capabilities of microwave imaging. So far, her computational studies indicate that her approach should detect tumors just a couple of millimeters across,an improvement on the five-millimeter limit of x-ray mammography. The first version of Hagness's instrument will be used for research.
| | HAGNESS | | SUSAN | | AGE 31 | | MEDICINE | | UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON |
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| | |  As a child,Michael Hansen hung out at Radio Shack and wrote such good programs on the store's computers that the salespeople an them as demos. Software mastered, he learned hardware,earning a graduate degree in electrical engineering.ln 1993 he joined Princeton, NJ-based Sarnoff to tackle visual processing—"the hardest darn problem I'd ever seen." Before he knew it, Hansen, who also found time to become a private pilot, was leading a $5 million-a-year group. In 2000 his team developed a chip that lets inexpensive portable devices process visual data collected by surveillance cameras-The chip provides hundreds of times more visual processing than a general-purpose Pentium microprocessor at one-tenth the cost, says Peter Burt. Director of the vision technologies lab at Sarnoff. Thefor-profit R&D company
believes networks of such simple devices will have great commercial value in military
surveillance, law enforcement and auto safety.ln order to.as he puts it,"shorten the path from technology development to new products," Hansen is now working on his MBA.
| | HANSEN | | MICHAEL | | AGE 32 | | HARDWARE | | SARNOFF |
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| | |  In school, Ramesh Hariharan found biology boring. But once he became a computer science professor at the Indian Institute of Science, he got excited about the race to map the human genome.So he cofounded Strand Genomics in Bangalore, where he designs software tools to efficiently analyze the ever increasing volume of data about the make up of genes.0ne U.S.customer is applying Hariharan's data-crunching innovations to pro-teomics—the analysis of protein structures to aid in the discovery of new drugs.Strand Genomics expects to grow from 35 to 100 employees this year. Wearing another hat, Hariharan also works to bridge the digital divide.
With colleagues from the university and from a local software firm, he started the nonprofit Simputer Trust to develop a simple,cheap (under $200), portable, battery-operated computer to bring the Internet to the developing world.The trust's first targets are rural Indian village schools, hospitals or community centers that have phone lines.Villagers get smart cards that give them access to a shared Simputer, while touch-screen icons and the Dhvani text-to-speech system Hariharan developed empower illiterate users.
| | HARIHARAN | | RAMESH | | AGE 32 | | SOFTWARE | | STRAND GENOMICS |
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| | |  Mar Hershenson came to Silicon Valley from Barcelona, Spain.for a summer job, met her future husband and stayed, bringing a bit of her native city to California in the form of Barcelona Design, which she cofounded in 1999. The Sunnyvale,CA, company produces software and intellectual property, developed by Hershenson, for quickly optimizing the design of analog circuits for cell phones,TVs and DVD players. Previously, engineers could spend a year designing a single analog chip. With Barcelona's solution, custom analog circuits can be finished in hours. Hershenson's breakthrough was to represent circuits with equations that can be solved rnathernatically. She learned the technique in a course taught by Stephen Boyd,the Stanford University professor with whom she launched the cornpany.The45-employee firm has raised $44 million and lined up several large clients, including chip-making
| | HERSHENSON | | MAR | | AGE 30 | | SOFTWARE | | BARCELONA DESIGN |
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| | |  Growing up in the shadow of Amgenin in Thousand Oaks, then working in the
company's lab during college,JohnHamngton saw what it takes to succeed in biotech's upper echelon. He kept that in mind when he founded Cleveland-based Athersys in 1994, then worked 18 hours a day to build it while still a postdoc.
During that time Harrington coinvented the first man-made human chromosome; gene
therapists are now investigating how to use such artificial chromosomes to penetrate cells and repair disease-causing genes. In his academic work, Harrington discovered fenl.a DNA-cutting enzyme that can accelerate the spread of cancers. Athersys is pursuing drugs that inhibit fen I because they have the potential to treat cancer, alone or with chemotherapy. Athersys's 130 employees are also commercializing Harrington's most recent invention, a process called "random activation of gene expression," which unveils the functions of proteins and could be an important tool in medical research and therapy.Athersys investors seem happy with Harrinqton's creations and his ability to qo all out: since 2000 they have chipped in $90 million.
| | HARRINGTON | | JOHN | | AGE 34 | | MEDICINE | | ATHERSYS |
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Source From: TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
June 2002
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產業智庫 
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