Naomi Wu
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2022
8:31 · 102K views · Oct 17, 2019
Naomi Wu documents her project helping Martha Lillard, one of the last polio survivors living in an iron lung, by fabricating replacement neck collars in Shenzhen. She reports the collars worked.
HN cites it as a concrete example of a maker helping save someone's life, and as evidence of Wu's work when she was omitted from press coverage.
5 comments from Hacker News
Wow, i’ve read all her 3 long blog posts about what happened and it angers me so much. I knew Vice was shit, but I had higher expectations from NY Times, Google or Twitter. Here are the other parts: - part 2: [LINK] - part 3: [LINK] There was a positive outcome too, though, check out this video where she helps save someone’s life (SFW): this video
>But the engineering feats alone will never be the focus as a consequence. There's a line between "never be the focus" and "we will erase you". This sort of thing is constant- but I'll give you a recent example- NPR recently ran this story: [LINK] About an American lady who needed some parts for her iron lung and how no one would help her. Only the thing is, they knew I already had: this video I'd fabricated the collars in Shenzhen, mailed the first batch, revised them and needed someone on the US side to to the final fitting. Martha told them this, a quick search told them this, hundreds of people told them this- did NPR revise the story to correct the omission of "oh by the way this problem we were talking about was solved by this female engineer". No of course not. I mean, it's NPR, you think they are going to get smut on their fingers writing about someone who looks like me? Never going to happen. Then the Razer mask story, I was central to it and some outlets gave me credit: [LINK] Others like the Verge flatly refused to mention my involvement- even jumping through some pretty crazy hoops to avoid it: [LINK] Again, hundreds of people called them out. But they did the math and decided that the stigma of mentioning someone who looked like me was worse. That's just the last few months- this has been a constant for years. I fully Open Sourced the best selling 3D printer on the planet, have the first five Open Source Hardware Association certifications granted in China- which pe
Twitter is a shifty way to present information and to talk.I looked around and found out that she sent some collars in 2019. She also made a YouTube video of what she was doing at the time this video the video shows up if you search 'Martha Iron Lung' so it's not like it is hidden... A 2017 Wired article [LINK] states that Naomi was spearheading the effort then.
> And the collars didn’t necessarily work either. They were shipped, not installed/tested. Are you sure about that? Look at the pinned comment on the original video from 2 years ago: this video
And the Wired article is the first result on Google for "martha iron lung parts". Even more, Martha herself commented on her video: this video