José Gómez-Márquez, 32

José Gómez-Márquez's lab at MIT seems to be part toy store, part machine shop, and part medical cente­r. Plastic toys are scattered across the bench tops, along with a disassembled drugstore pregnancy test, all manner of syringes, and a slew of fake body parts. Coffee filters have been transformed into paper-based diagnostics; a dime-store helicopter provides the design for a new asthma inhaler; even a toilet plunger has been put to use, rigged with tubes and glue to form a makeshift centrifuge.

"Centrifuges break down all the time," says Gómez-Márquez, spinning the plunger's wooden handle in his hands. That's a problem for health-care workers, because even simple medical tests rely on the devices to separate molecules in a blood or urine sample. In rich countries, the broken equipment is quickly repaired or replaced; in the poor countries where Gómez-Márquez often works, finding replacement parts can be impossible, rendering the equipment useless. So he's tried to use readily available materials to make simple versions that are either easy to fiddle with, disposable, or unlikely to break in the first place. "This one could work even without power," he says of the plunger-cum-centrifuge.

Gómez-Márquez, a native of Hondura­s, is a talented tinkerer: "My mother used to say my toys would last only a few days because I would take them apart, saying I had detected a defect," he recalls. But he is also an inventor on a mission. "When you grow up in a developing country," he says, "you get the sense that fancy technology is expensive to replace, so it often doesn't get replaced."

In his few short years in the field, Gómez-Márquez has gained a reputation among Boston medical-device researchers for his insight into a wide array of design issues. "There are not many people out there that have as broad a view of innovative technology in low-resource settings," says Kristian Olson, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and leader of the Global Health Initiative at the Center for Integration of Medical and Innovative Technology. "He finds a need and then a technology to fit that need. It's a remarkable way of approaching technology development for poor people."

Some might say that Gómez-Márquez was born to improve medical technology. In 1976, when prenatal ultrasound was not available to his mother's doctor in Honduras (it was just catching on in the United States), the physician mistakenly concluded that she was carrying twins and miscalculated how far along she was in her pregnancy. She was induced to give birth in what was actually her seventh month, and Gómez-Márquez--no twin in sight--was born with the numerous health concerns typical of an underweight and premature infant. He escaped any long-term damage. But thanks to a childhood spent in and out of doctors' offices, he developed a profound sense of how important health care was, how capricious access to it could be, and how much medical devices could do to improve it.

It helped, too, that he comes from a medical family. His grandfather, a surgeon, worked at both private and public hospitals in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Hondura­s, where Gómez-Márquez saw firsthand the differences that money made in access to medical services. Poor people, who went to the public hospital, were less likely to get chemotherapy or appropriate prostheses. "People who could afford it would go to Texas or Boston for their health care," he says.