10/23/2025
Brilliant but simple. And potentially life saving.
At just 17 years old, Iowa high school student Dasia Taylor began asking a question that few adults had ever thought to tackle:
How can we detect surgical infections early — without relying on costly medical technology?
Her solution was as creative as it was practical: color-changing sutures dyed with beet juice. 🧵💡
Taylor discovered that beet pigments naturally shift color based on pH levels. Healthy skin tends to be slightly acidic, while infected wounds become more alkaline. In controlled lab tests, her sutures — when exposed to infected conditions — changed from bright red to deep purple at a pH around 9, often within minutes. This visible change could alert patients and healthcare workers to an infection even in places with no access to lab tests, electricity, or smartphones.
Through experimentation, she found that a cotton–polyester blend best retained the beet dye and produced the most reliable color change. The simplicity of her design meant it could be affordable, biodegradable, and easy to implement, especially in low-resource hospitals and rural clinics where post-surgical infections are a leading cause of complications.
Her ingenuity didn’t go unnoticed — Dasia became a Regeneron Science Talent Search finalist (2021) and was later honored as a USA Today Woman of the Year (Iowa, 2023). She is now working toward a patent and continuing to refine her design for clinical use.
While her invention isn’t FDA-approved yet, its potential is revolutionary: a self-monitoring suture that doesn’t need batteries, machines, or digital tools — just the chemistry of nature.
At its heart, Dasia’s innovation is more than a scientific achievement — it’s a message. That brilliance doesn’t require billion-dollar labs, and that even a single, curious teenager can design something capable of saving lives across the world.
