The Do-Good Imperative

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• A lightweight, cloth satellite dish set inside an eight-foot cloth globe that resembled a big beach ball, cost a fraction of the price of a traditional dish and consumed a sliver of the power. It packed up neatly into a couple of boxes and was shippable anywhere overnight by FedEx (FDX).

My particular interest is in biology and disease surveillance, so I began imagining all sorts of mash-ups. For example, the Ultimate Field Lab: Take one cheap portable satellite dish, add a solar refrigerator for storing samples and transporting vaccine and some "lab on a chip" rapid diagnostic tests. Now garnish with a panoramic digital camera, cell phones, and computers (powered by micro fuel cells since we're dreaming big) linked to a central lab. Now pack it all into a minivan or, should the occasion require, a mule cart.

Two years later, reality is fast catching up.

The Human Factor

The cell phone has been transformed into the 21st century's answer to the Swiss Army knife: a must-have tool for everything from disease monitoring to farm irrigation schemes (dial into a satellite to figure out where to water). Short messaging has become the new way to S.O.S. And the push for better ways to cram large amounts of information into ever-tinier bits for the low bandwidths of the developing world will help us all.

Technology for the greater good has become a movement. Inspired by Sahana, programmers from all over the world have banded together to develop Humanitarian, Free & Open Source Software (H-FOSS) tools.

Corporations are also getting more and more involved. The earth was still quaking from aftershocks in China in May when first responder programmers from Google, IBM (IBM), and Microsoft (MSFT) sprang into action to build customized search engines and set up disaster management tools.

Still, high tech, like any technology, is only as good as how it is used. Just days after Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar in May, killing 100,000 and displacing millions more, Sahana was translated into Burmese. Whether it will be used to its potential, though, is in the hands of a government that so far has shown more interest in its own welfare than that of its people.

The Key to the Future

Likewise, the ability to track and correlate weather patterns with disease outbreaks buys valuable time to prevent outbreaks (e.g., floods lead to mosquitoes lead to cases of West Nile, malaria, chikungunya, or Rift Valley Fever). Yet without the money and ability to distribute vaccines, drugs, and bed nets, it may not matter.

The need for more and better answers is beyond urgent. Billions of people live in poverty. According to a recent Oxfam report, the number and severity of natural disasters is on the rise. So too are outbreaks of new emerging diseases, including HIV, SARS, Ebola, and West Nile, and a resurgence of drug-resistant scourges such as tuberculosis and malaria.

In an ever-flattening world, regional disasters can quickly go global, while global events can have devastating local consequences. If innovation is driven by necessity, then there is more than enough inspiration enough for us all.

Doing good is more than smart business. It gives hope for a better future.

Janet A. Ginsburg began covering disease issues as a correspondent for BusinessWeek in 2000. She has worked as a print journalist and a video producer, and is particularly interested in the intersections between micro and macro biology from ecological, cultural, economic, and political perspectives. Ginsburg is developing an online publication for InSTEDD focusing on technology for health and humanitarian work. For more, visit her blog, germtales.