 The University of California has a tradition of doing research in the interest of the public good. This is a great example of research that's going to benefit the public. We're going to produce an anti-malarial drug inexpensively for the people of the developing world and potentially save one to two million lives every year. Currently malaria affects 40% of the world's population. Two to three million people die every year from malaria. 90% of them are children under the age of five. And in those countries most affected by malaria it's been estimated by economists that it reduces their gross domestic product by 50%. So not only is it taking a lot of lives but those who have it and live with it are debilitated and can't work, which reduces their country's capacity to compete in the world. Artemisinin is currently being used to treat malaria. Artemisinin is a cure for malaria because there's no resistance to the drug. The problem with many of the inexpensive drugs that are available, like the chloroquine-based drugs, is that they are no longer effective. The organism that causes malaria has grown resistant to them and therefore they're not effective even though they're the drugs that people can afford. Artemisinin comes from a plant called sweet wormwood. Sweet wormwood grows throughout the world but the plants that produce the most Artemisinin are grown in Southeast Asia. The current process for producing Artemisinin is very expensive. It involves growing the plant on small farms, extracting the molecule, the active ingredient from the plant, and then taking it to a pharmaceutical to be purified further and incorporated into a drug. The problem with Artemisinin is that it is far too expensive for anyone in Africa or in any developing world country to afford. It costs about $2.40 and that's the best negotiated price, negotiated by the World Health Organization, and it's available to a very few people. The goal of our project is to produce Artemisinin at one-tenth of its current costs. The research we're doing is to develop essentially a chemical factory inside a bacterium to produce the anti-malarial drug. We can use modern biotechnology and modern engineering principles to engineer this bacterium. We take the genes from the plant, we place them in the bacterium, and then the bacterium produces this anti-malarial drug, Artemisinin. By building this small chemical factory, we can produce the drug very inexpensively and cut down purification costs that plague the current drug that's extracted from plants. The impact of doing research in this particular area is that we could save one to two million lives every year if we can supply this drug inexpensively to them. This is a real motivation for graduate students and postdocs working at the bench with the day-to-day details knowing that their research could be applied to saving millions of lives.