After years of tinkering, he came up with the Foldscope. It’s a microscope that comes as a single sheet of thick paper: you snap out the components, fold them origami-style, and thread them together. Ten minutes later, you have a device that weighs 9 grams, fits in a pocket, holds regular microscope slides, and can magnify their contents more than 2,000 times using a small built-in lens. That’s good enough to visualize everything from a ladybug’s claws to a colony of bacteria. Best of all, the device costs less than a dollar to manufacture.

At first, Prakash set up a makeshift factory in his lab and printed around 50,000 of the Foldscopes. He and his team members have since shipped 10,000 of those out by hand, as part of a broad beta-test.

Pomerantz was one of the lucky recipients. “It has been so useful for my fieldwork,” he says, having used it to study plant cells, mites, fly larvae, and single-celled parasites. “It feels like holding a piece of paper, because that’s what it sort of is. It’s also really robust. I take really long hikes in the jungle, so it gets dumped on by rain and mud—and it still works.”

There are other such cheap microscopes, including some that can be fitted onto cellphones. But Prakash thinks such designs are still subservient to the expensive technology that they deign to replace. “We wanted to make a device that functions on its own,” he says. “The idea of designing for a cellphone rubs me the wrong way.”

The Foldscope can, however, be used with a phone. As Pomerantz demonstrates in a video, if you stick a smartphone over the eyepiece, you can take pictures or record videos of whatever’s in the frame. If you stick a light source behind the Foldscope, you can turn it into a projector. And with small tweaks, the vanilla Foldscope can be transformed into a dark-field microscope (which visualizes objects against a black background) or a fluorescence microscope (which studies objects that glow under certain lights). “It’s a very hackable object,” says Prakash. “Culturally, paper is an object that kids are very happy to play with.”

The scope’s uses are manifold. Field biologists like Pomerantz can study organisms in their natural settings, rather than having to first ship them back to a laboratory. Health workers in poor countries can detect the parasites that cause malaria, leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, and other tropical diseases.

But Prakash is most excited about amateurs just using the Foldscope to look at the world around them. “The biggest thing we’re trying to do is to make people curious,” he says. “Our ambition is that every kid should be able to carry a microscope in their pocket.” To make that happen, Prakash is now courting larger organizations that can take over the manufacturing and distribution. And he is convinced that once the scopes get in the hands of users, the rest will be easy. For example, when one of Pomerantz’s colleagues gave an unassembled Foldscope to Mexican schoolchildren who didn’t speak English; the kids just ignored the instructions and put together the microscope on their own. Then, they started looking at anything they could get their hands on.