Rajan Anandan, Vice President and Managing Director (India and South East Asia) Google, ranks number two in Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business 2015. Rajan is finding inventive ways to channel affordable web access to South East Asia’s 500 million Internet users.
So, what is the Sri Lanka-born Anandan, an MIT and Stanford graduate, doing? According to the article, he has got smartphone makers to launch low-cost phones by pushing hardware specs of the Android One operating platform that reduce manufacturing costs of phones. Moreover, he has pushed Indian telecom operators to drop data-plan costs by a fifth, pushed for translation of Google products and services into numerous local languages and got Google to take YouTube offline so that users can download videos when they have Wi-Fi access. Rajan is also collaborating with the PM’s office on the Digital India programme. All these initiatives got him the second rank.
The top slot went to Charles Arntzen, Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University’s Centre for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, for fighting Ebola with, and you will be surprised, tobacco! Arntzen, says Fast Company, is considered the godfather of a growing field of research called ‘pharming’ , engineering plants to produce specialised vaccines and other drugs. ZMapp, an injectable synthetic serum he helped devise using genetically engineered antibodies grown in tobacco plants, is currently the most promising drug treatment for people infected with Ebola. ZMapp was given to two American health workers who had been infected in Liberia last year and they recovered.
Pharming, which is now getting support from Big Pharma, could be the key to responding to future threats, providing a large supply of drugs or vaccines at epidemic speed.
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