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Cloning Embryos, Foreign Teachers, Godcasting and Watermelon Perfection
Charles Osgood Reporting Reporting
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Despite religious and political objections, researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston, the main pediatric teaching hospital at Harvard Medical School are going ahead with efforts to make stem cells out of laboratory grown human embryos.
Overseeing the human embryo cloning and stem cell work being done by Harvard researchers is Dr. George Daley.
"We'd like to move a specific patient's disease into a petri dish, that way we can study the disease and also develop customized therapies for that patient," said Dr. George Daley.
His specialty is blood diseases like leukemia and sickle cell anemia. Two of his colleagues will be doing similar stem cell work on diabetes and neuro-degenerative disorders like MS and Lou Gehrig's disease.
"These are conditions that are devastating. They\'re painful they are often life threatening, and we have very very poor treatments," said Daley.
There's no guarantee this stem cell approach will do any better, but there is hope.
"They've done it in animals successfully. This shows at least the possibility and some evidence that it can be successful in humans," said Dr. Ruth Macklin, professor of bio-ethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
These lab embryos have no possibility of birth or survival. But how about the moral objection that in this research human embryos are both created and destroyed?
"Nobody who believes that an embryo has a moral status equal to a living human being, nobody is ever required to donate embryos for this kind of stem cell research," said Macklin.
For Dr. Macklin, the ethical weight is in the possibility for good.
"I think it represents an advance in the technology and holds out some hope of being able to treat people with a variety of very prevalent and very terrible serious diseases," said Macklin.
America Recruiting Teachers From Abroad
When we think of immigrants coming here we often thin of them as coming to take jobs Americans don't want. Would you put school teaching in that category? More and more our American school systems are bringing in teachers from other countries.
Dallas brings in bilingual teachers from Mexico and Chile. Clark County Nevada imports math and science teachers from Canada. Topeka is hiring teachers in India and Spain. And Baltimore, which already has 200 Filipino teachers, sent a recruiting team to Manila to hire 81 more. Recruiter Patrick Crouse tells our Wyatt Andrews.
"I could go out for recruitment and I might see 5 or 10 teachers," said Patrick Crouse.
"But go overseas and what happens?" asked CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews.
"Overseas we saw hundreds," said Crouse.
America's teacher shortage is so well known in the Philippines that their colleges offered special courses in American education.
"We were trained about the "no child left behind act". We were given ideas and then on behavior management," said Victoria Borja, Special Education Teacher.
All this may seem like a great idea to some people but not to Reg Weaver. He\'s head of the National Education Association, America's largest teachers union.
"I think going overseas to get teachers is not the answer," said Reg Weaver, the head of the National Education Association.
He thinks it's the heavy workload and the low starting salaries that are creating the shortage of teachers here.
"And so what is happening, many people are saying I\'m not coming into the profession, or once they come in they say, I'm not going to stay," said Weaver.
The Philippine teachers who come to Baltimore triple their salary by the way. Wyatt Andrews asked Baltimore recruiter Crouse:
"Is there a small part of you that says at some point, I wish we had enough native borns? asked Andrews.
"In some respect, but I live with what we have to live with," said Crouse.
Religious Podcasting
Some people say podcasting is the hippest, hottest thing. But do you have to be hot and hip to podcast? What does it tell you that the Vatican has been in on it. And that it has competition.
"Well, they're calling it Godcasting now, aren't they?" said Vatican Radio Director Sean-Patrick Lovett.
Religion isn't letting any grass grow under it\'s feet. The latest instrument of faith is the MP3 Player.
"Well, hi there. This is Lifespring" from Lifespring podcast.
Podcasting allows anyone anywhere to download audio files into their computer or iPod any time of night or day. Podcasts can be from anywhere, even on high.
"As a matter of fact, I registered the Godcast.org name the same evening that I heard about podcasting," said Craig Patchett.
Patchett started Godcast.org with programs like Lifespring, bible studies, and music. He's had over one million hits from more than 125 countries.
"For one guy working out of a corner of his bedroom, I think that's a perfect demonstration of the power and the reach that podcasting offers," said Craig Patchett.
Now Buddhists, Baptists, Hare Krishnas, and even the Vatican, have jumped on the podcast wagon.
"It's not enough to have a message, you have to know how to communicate, how to get that message across," said Lovett.
Lovett says from printing the Guttenberg Bible to having Marconi set up Vatican broadcasts, the Catholic Church has always used the newest tools to reach the masses.
"Podcasting is the next step along that evolutionary road," said Lovett.
Craig Patchett says it's amazing how quickly "Godcasting" has taken off.
"Podcasting is one of the few Internet technologies to be adopted by religion even before it's been adopted by pornography," said Patchett.
The Scientific Way To Pick A Ripe Watermelon
How do you tell if a watermelon is ripe?
"It's really funny to watch people down the supermarket aisle thumping away. I have no idea what they're doing or what they're listening for," said teacher Mike Lampert.
The mystery has been solved in a high school physics class.
While working in a grocery store, Oregonian Ryan Bonacker kept hearing the same question:
'Hey, can you find me a ripe watermelon?' So I would just kind of, uh, thump watermelons, and say, 'Oh sure, this is a ripe watermelon,' and give it to them," said Ryan Bonacker.
At West Salem High School, Bonacker and 12 physics classmates applied for a $10,000 grant through MIT to create a "watermelon ripeness evaluator." They got it and went to work.
"When you hit a watermelon it's like striking a bell. The whole thing resonates back and forth," said Lampert.
Teacher Mike Lampert led the research.
"What we've determined is it's the length of time that the bell, or the watermelon, resonates that determines its ripeness," said Lampert.
A hundred watermelons later they came up with their handheld electronic device.
"It has a little thumper mechanism on the side, which is spring-loaded. And when you press it with your thumb, it releases this thumper which hits the watermelon." said Bonacker.
Amy Hafer helped calculate the relationship between a watermelon's chemistry and its ripeness.
"We would slice it open, test the sugar content, the pH, and the color of it, and then we'd taste it," said Amy Hafer.
They wrote a computer program to measure the sound waves produced by the thump.
"There's this LED bar display, and if it's ripe, then the display lights all the way up. And if it's unripe, then you don't get any lights," said Bonacker.
Lampert took the students to MIT to display their thumper.
"They\'re coming into my classroom, now, and saying, "Mr. Lampert, Mr. Lampert, I've got this great idea!" You know, everybody's thinking about invention, which is cool," said Lampert.
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