Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined by Carrie and Korin from the Glia project to talk about some of their projects and specifically to talk about why 3D-printed medical devices are really cool and how they help get medical devices to places where they are not otherwise easily accessible. They talk about Glia's work on 3D-printed tourniquets, stethoscopes, otoscopes, and dialysis machines. Also, please give them $5 million. You won't regret it.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery.

Guest Info

Glia can be found at www.glia.org or on Twitter @Glia_Intl

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Glia on 3D Printing Medical Devices

Inmn 00:15 Hello, and welcome to live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Inmn Neruin. And this week we're going to be talking with Glia, a rad organization that designs 3D printed medical devices so that no matter where you are, you can access basic and quality medical devices. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [Singing a simple melody]

Inmn 01:17 And we're back. Thanks so much, y'all, for coming on the podcast today. Would y'all like to introduce yourselves with your name, pronouns, nd what you what you're here to talk about or what your role is in Glia.

Carrie 01:45 Okay, I'll go first. My name is Carrie Wakem and she/her and my role at Glia is executive director. It sounds very flashy. It's not. We're all team players here at Glia.

Korin 02:00 My name is Korin, my pronouns are she and they. I'm a volunteer with the Glia project, particularly focused on the tourniquets, and specifically with regards to manufacturing instructions and quality control documentation.

Inmn 02:13 Cool. And would you want to kind of introduce what Glia is?

Carrie 02:20 Absolutely. So Glia is a medical device manufacturing company. We do lots of research and we build and research devices that are considered high quality, open source, and at cost. And that's sort of the stuff that we do.

Inmn 02:42 How did Glia come to get started? Also, does Glia stand for anything? Is it an acronym? Or is it just a fun word?

Carrie 02:50 Everybody asks that question about the acronym and how we became Glia or where the name came from and really there's no interesting story behind it. I think the original team on the Glia project just basically said, "What should we call this?" Somebody throw it the name Glia. And then it stuck as far as I know. But that was before my time. I can absolutely speak to a bit of the history of Glia and how it came to be. So, our founder Tarek Loubani is in emergency medicine physician in London, Ontario in Canada. And he works frequently in the Gaza Strip. And quite a few years ago he was there during the war and he was responding to a large amount of casualties. And