November 29, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
Four individuals and one charity were honored by the Tech Museum of Innovation for their creative use of technology to benefit society.
The San Jose, Calif., museum received more than 390 nominations, representing 50 countries. A group of judges assembled by Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society selected the winners, who received $50,000 each.
The Freeplay Foundation, a nonprofit group in Constantia, South Africa, was honored for its work providing wind-up and solar-powered radios to people in developing countries and creating educational radio programming on such topics as nutrition, business, and HIV and AIDS prevention.
The individual award recipients included a developer of inexpensive easy-to-fit prosthetic limbs, a creator of a low-cost electrical system for rural areas, a researcher studying gene expression in malaria, and a scientist who had developed new reproductive technologies to benefit endangered species.
For more information: Go to http://www.thetech.org.
