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How one chemist is saving lives with house paint
Spanish visionary Pilar Mateo is snuffing out bug-borne diseases and the poverty behind them.
By: Sidney Stevens
Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 08:43 AM
When Pilar Mateo earned her Ph.D. in chemistry years ago, she planned to join her father?s paint company in her native Valencia, Spain. Her goals were admirable but not necessarily world-changing: develop better, more durable paints and live a charitable life helping others in her local community. It never dawned on her that house paint might be the key to something so life-altering as curbing diseases around the world, or that helping others might mean tackling something really big, like ending poverty.
A newspaper article about the closing of a local cockroach-infested hospital changed everything. A tinkerer by nature, Mateo set about devising a microencapsulation technology that would let her lace paint with slow-release insecticides that were safe for people but deadly to bugs. The process was eventually patented and is now approved for use in 15 countries. That was the beginning of Inesfly Corporation...
How one chemist is saving lives with house paint
Spanish visionary Pilar Mateo is snuffing out bug-borne diseases and the poverty behind them.
By: Sidney Stevens
Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 08:43 AM
When Pilar Mateo earned her Ph.D. in chemistry years ago, she planned to join her father?s paint company in her native Valencia, Spain. Her goals were admirable but not necessarily world-changing: develop better, more durable paints and live a charitable life helping others in her local community. It never dawned on her that house paint might be the key to something so life-altering as curbing diseases around the world, or that helping others might mean tackling something really big, like ending poverty.
A newspaper article about the closing of a local cockroach-infested hospital changed everything. A tinkerer by nature, Mateo set about devising a microencapsulation technology that would let her lace paint with slow-release insecticides that were safe for people but deadly to bugs. The process was eventually patented and is now approved for use in 15 countries. That was the beginning of Inesfly Corporation...
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