>>ELIZA WILLS: Jane Chen and Linus Liang, 2012 winners of the Grinnell Prize in Social Justice. Jane and Linus received this award in recognition of their innovations in designing and distributing a low cost baby warmer that has already saved the lives of thousands of premature and low weight babies born in India, China, and Zambia, and very soon it will be introduced in Afghanistan. Their goal is to distribute their baby incubator to one million families in poor countries over the next five years.
>>JANE CHEN: Sadly, twenty million low birth weight and premature babies are born every year around the world. Four million babies die in the first 28 days of their life. That's 450 babies every hour.
>>LINUS LIANG: The challenge was to build a low cost incubator. Normal incubators, as Jane was saying, cost $20,000 and our challenge was to built it for 1% of the cost.
The reason, for example, we started Embrace was because we believe that just because you don't win that genetic lottery doesn't mean you shouldn't have an equal chance for a healthy lifestyle. This is really our purpose for the company, the organization and what we're really trying to help solve is because we believe everyone should have an equal chance at a healthy lifestyle. That equality and giving opportunity is sort of the broad definition for me for social justice.
>>JANE CHEN: Embrace in the next five years I hope that we have global distribution at that point, that we can impact the lives of a million babies and their families, that we can start distributing not just the technology, but the education that goes along with it, and having real impact on infant mortality.
>>LINUS LIANG: Now looking back has been really, really touching. Seeing all the pictures, seeing all the things that we've accomplished. It's very hard to take that step back, and I think actually this week has given us the opportunity to really take that step back and has really inspired me and really sort of re-energized me on what we're doing and the work that we continue to do.
>>JANE CHEN: The smile on this mother's face when she put her baby in the Embrace product and the fact that the baby was now six weeks later after being placed in our product for that time at a healthy birth weight. That smile on her face was just totally priceless. So beyond saving millions of lives, even thinking about each one of these individual cases it's the most gratifying work I could think about doing.
