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GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Technology Impacts the World

Aired December 21, 2003 - 16:00:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FEMI OKE: Coming up, going under. We dive into a new field of research and pickup a few choice samples along the way.
You can run, but you can't hide. A new way to capture wildlife without actually catching it.

And moon shots. Star gazing or star grazing. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to colonize space.

Hello and welcome to GLOBAL CHALLENGES, from the Bahamas.

Ever since homo sapiens started walking the earth, it is what nature has to offer to help us survive, and we as a species have been remarkably clever when it comes to isolating that really good stuff and using it for its healing properties.

Here at the Rhine (ph) Nature Center, for instance, there are plants that are now being used to fight diseases like diabetes, leukemia, and even treat rheumatism. But there was a snag. There's only so much of the earth's surface left to look for valuable new plants and organisms.

Hold on a minute. 2/3 of the earth's surface is covered by water. Life as we know it began in the ocean, so surely there are many more secrets yet to be revealed. And that is why we're here.

We hooked up with some researchers who are plumbing the depths.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): This is a voyage of scientific discovery. It's a mission to explore strange new deep sea organisms, to seek out new life in the ocean that can be used to save lives on land.

These pioneering scientists are from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, a not-for-profit research group based in Florida. Most of their time is spent working in laboratories, searching for chemicals to cure human diseases.

But a few times a year they take a very expensive cruise and go diving, and it's all part of the job.

(on camera): The (UNINTELLIGIBLE) has been sailing up the coast off the Bahamas for the last two weeks. It is beautiful out here, but this isn't a pleasure cruise. This is strictly business. Scientific business, because somewhere in this ocean could be a cure for pancreatic cancer, perhaps a chemical that might shrink a tumor or even kill cancer cells. And this is what biomedical marine research is all about. Looking for medicine under the sea. (voice-over): First, let me show you Discodermolide. It's a deep water sponge that contains a compound that can kill cancer cells. It's already been used in human trials and if all goes well it could be on the market in the next few yeas.

Onboard the ship, the communications desk keeps track of the sub, which appears on the computer screen as a small blue fish.

Finding a cure for cancer is a group effort. Captain George (ph) plans the week trying to keep the scientists on course for the dives they've planned.

(on camera): Do you pay any attention to what your scientists are doing?

CAPT. GEORGE (ph), HARBOR BRANCH: None whatsoever. No. I'm always interested in looking at the video that they come up with, and you know, it's a big ocean and anything is possible with what they recover.

OKE (voice-over): Every dive is greeted with enthusiasm. Not only will the scientists onboard preserve samples, but for a few days they get to see the marine life they've been studying in its natural environment, up close and still in one piece. But not for long.

The changing pressure and temperature means whatever has been collected has to be sorted immediately.

This sponge is being studied to see if it can cure pancreatic cancer. With potential like this, no wonder chief scientist John Reed (ph) is so enthused.

JOHN REED (ph), HARBOR BRANCH: I'm like a kid in a candy shop. It's like exploration, I don't know what I'm going to see, each dive is new and different, whether it's a scuba dive or a submersible dive. I'm in the sub, I've got my face jammed against the glass.

We've collected about 220 organisms, different species, from sponges to sea fans to algae, seaweeds.

OKE: And there's been a surprise find. A rare and elusive sponge found 19 years ago is rediscovered during the trip. It's already causing a stir because early tests indicate that it has extremely potent anti-cancer properties.

Mission accomplished for stage one. Now it's back to Harbor Branch's high-tech headquarters in Florida where the long arduous tasks begin.

Jamie Thompson (ph) is a molecular biologist. She's compiling a list of sponge DNA so it'll be easier to study. Like many of her colleagues, her study is going to take years.

JAMIE THOMPSON (ph), SCIENTIST: I want to get most of my DNA within the size range of 40KB, so I will take it through a few steps to make.

(CROSSTALK)

THOMPSON (ph): 40,000 (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

OKE (on camera):: I was faking it, Jamie (ph), I'm sorry.

THOMPSON (ph): Well, you're good at that.

OKE (voice-over): Also faking it, rather more convincingly, is Dr. Alan Duckworth. He's trying to grow sponges in the lab using some of the Discodermolide brought back from the Bahamas. The aim is to artificially produce the drug commercially without stripping the sponge from its natural environment.

But this experimental kind of drug research is not cheap. 10 days at sea costs about 1/4-million dollars. The feeling here though is that it's money well spent.

AMY WRIGHT, SCIENTIST: If I could spend a couple thousands dollars to pay for a drug that kept my father alive a few more years, I would certainly have paid that money.

OKE: If one of these trips to the Bahamas is any indicating, the potential for developing major drugs and cures in the future is truly exciting (UNINTELLIGIBLE) new voyage of discovery.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

And here's an interesting tidbit for you. Harbor Branch estimates that 98 percent of the ocean's depths have yet to be fully explored. Fathom that.

Stay with us. In a moment, we're off to another remote location, off the beaten track.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OKE: Hello. Right. OK. Yes, I see it. I've got that. All right. No problem. Talk to you soon. Bye.

You know, with all these gadgets we have, it can seem almost overwhelming at times. Sometimes you just want to get away. But where to? Some of these things are even being adapted for use in very remote places. But actually, that's a good thing.

Here's Gary Strieker from the jungles of Gabon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY STRIEKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Deep in this African forest, creatures can easily hide from noisy intruders like us. They can hide, but they leave signs behind them. For experienced eyes, unmistakable evidence that they're here all around us.

And with a new high-tech tool, it's information fed into a database.

LOUIS LIEBENBERG, TRACKER: It's a gorilla feeding sign. See these branches that have that have been broken and bent over like this? A gorilla feeding, they sort of pull the branch and you can also see the direction of movement by the direction that the branches are aligned.

STRIEKER: With these professional trackers, we find animals signs everywhere. A tree used by elephants to scratch their backs.

LIEBENBERG: You can still see the sort of mud clinging to the bark.

STRIEKER: A fruit eaten by a gorilla.

LIEBENBERG: You can see it's quite fresh. The edges haven't sort of browned or darkened yet.

STRIEKER: Up in the trees, sleeping nests reveal how many gorillas are in the group. In a forest like this, where it's often impossible to catch anything more than a fleeting glimpse of an animal, tracking is the only way to collect information on wildlife.

(on camera): The (UNINTELLIGIBLE) of tracking is not just noticing what's on the ground, but interpreting what you see.

LIEBENBERG: Yes, it involves interpreting tracks. If you want to know what the animal was doing. So you keep looking at the relative position of the tracks, which tells you whether it was walking slowly, whether it was running, fleeing from something.

STRIEKER (voice-over): South African Louis Liebenberg is an expert animal tracker, but he realized some years ago, for purposes of research or management, collecting reliable wildlife observations from trackers just wasn't practical.

LIEBENBERG: Trackers would go out into the forest and they'd come back to the base camp and maybe report a few significant sightings, but with a vague idea of where it might have been, which would have had very little usefulness.

STRIEKER: That's why Liebenberg developed the CyberTracker, a handheld personal organizer with special software, enabling trackers to enter their observations in the field. And because it's connected by satellite to a global positioning system, CyberTracker records exactly where and when observations are made.

LIEBENBERG: CyberTracker runs on any PDA with a Palm operating system and connected to a GPS. It's just a standard personal organizer that you can buy in any shop.

STRIEKER: When the tracker returns to base camp, perhaps after weeks alone in the field, all data collected in his CyberTracker is downloaded into a central computer which interprets and displays his observations.

Wildlife managers and researchers can see on maps where the tracker has been and what he's seen, and that's essential information for this conservation project in the Gamba protected areas in Gabon.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Basically, the challenge is to get the data, which is already in the heads of all of us, park managers, local guards, local communities, to get that data out of their heads, into a database which is accessible to others.

STRIEKER: Damas Deconzo (ph) was one of the first to use this technology in Congo's national parks. Now he's training others across Africa.

DAMAS DECONZO (ph), TRACKER: The most difficult thing to learn about it was how to make yourself a database, what you would like to record on the (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

STRIEKER: After the software is customized with a database, a tracker can record what he sees in the field by using simple picture icons; what kind of animal, how many, male or female, doing what.

LIEBENBERG: The idea is that for each screen that you go through, the icons and the number of options should be so self-evident that anybody, just by looking at the screen, would know which selection to make.

It's really simple and easy to use.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): It's easy to operate because even if you don't understand the scientific information, it shows you pictures that will help you understand it.

STRIEKER: CyberTracker is so simple, virtually anyone can use it to collect field data for research.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It can be done by people who can't read and write. It can be accessed by people who are not technicians and it can show it, visually, the same day, when they come out of the forest.

STRIEKER (on camera): You could actually think of animal tracking as having been the origin of science, dating back to the evolution of the first modern humans.

CyberTracker is just a new technology that makes tracking more efficient, more useful to science today.

(voice-over): But CyberTracker can be used for more than just tracking animals. With only a little training, field workers can collect data on market and population studies, pest management, disaster relief, any project or emergency where large numbers of geographically precise observations are needed.

The software is available to anyone free online at the CyberTracker Web site, www.CyberTracker.org.

Liebenberg says it's been downloaded in more than 30 countries for many different kinds of research projects. But that's only scratching the surface of this technology's full potential. He foresees a time soon when powerful units like these will contain vast digital guidebooks, accessible through simple picture icons, enabling thousands of ordinary people, even schoolchildren, to gather critical observations on their environment, all their CyberTrackers connected to Internet sites monitoring the health of the entire planet.

Gary Strieker, CNN, in Setacoma (ph), Gabon.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: It's a digital world out there.

Femi, if this is becoming a digital world, where do we go from here? How about another world entirely. Plans are being laid even as I speak.

We'll explain more after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OKE: Welcome back.

So far today we've taken you to the ocean depths and into the jungles of Africa. Now a trip into another unknown, space.

Where the stars and planets and sheer mystery have inspired mankind to achieve great things. We've sent men to the moon and landed probes on Mars. The next step is to live up here.

Scientists are already setting up house and home (UNINTELLIGIBLE) here. Why? Because the grass is always greener on the other side.

Here's Rebecca MacKinnon.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

REBECCA MACKINNON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Meet Japans econauts (ph). Osamu Komatsubara and Masanori Shinohara are ecological pioneers.

Welcome to Mini-Earth. In 2009, Shinohara and Komatsubara will be sealed into this self-contained environment for four months straight. Between now and then, they'll be doing shorter stints starting with just one week at a time over the next couple of years, then gradually building up as the system gets perfected.

(on camera): This is to keep everything very clean, right?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

MACKINNON (voice-over): My camera crew and I are their privileged guests inside what will eventually be a tightly closed ecosystem. If all works as planned, Mini-Earth could become the prototype for long-term human habitation in outer space.

Meanwhile, dozens of scientists and technicians are working hard to get everything ready for the lonely days ahead.

(on camera): It's just you and the goats?

(voice-over): The animals and then men will all be wearing electrocardiograms, their vital data monitored constantly for signs of trouble.

Of course, they'll have to grow all their own food.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is for rice harvesting. Rice is our main crop.

MACKINNON: The high-tech rice paddies are designed for greatest possible efficiency, to prevent waste of water or minerals. And to minimize production of carbon dioxide, too much of which could kill the men and goats.

They grow vegetables too. Soybeans for protein along with peanuts and safflower plants for oil. The trick is to keep planting and harvesting constantly in order to guarantee a consistent year-round supply.

When it comes to their food, the econauts (ph) will do it all.

(on camera): So this will be your kitchen here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

MACKINNON: You'll do your own cooking? You're recycling all of your garbage.

(voice-over): All garbage gets recycled for fertilizer and for minerals the men need to keep themselves alive and healthy. Everything gets recycled.

(on camera): This looks like a special toilet.

(voice-over): . with the help of a high-tech urinal and toilet.

In the natural world, the earth's atmosphere, soil, oceans and forests do that recycling job for us. But scientists here have concluded that a small system like Mini-Earth can't hope to duplicate Mother Earth's constant job of recycling and rebalancing of all the minerals and gases that we need in just the right proportion to stay alive without a little help.

Dr. Keiji Nitta, Mini-Earth's founder and mastermind, is trying to duplicate the miracles of Mother Earth with a 2-story barn-full of high- tech machines.

(on camera): Your invention?

KEIJI NITTA, MINI-EARTH FOUNDER: Maybe.

MACKINNON: A veteran scientist who used to work at Japan's space exploration agency, Dr. Nitta has put together machines that pump waste out, reprocess it, and pump it back in again in a more useable, life- sustaining form.

The air inside Mini-Earth is constantly rebalanced, which Dr. Nitta hopes will prevent a carbon dioxide imbalance that led to the failure of Biosphere II, another enclosed ecosystem experiment conducted in the 1990's in Arizona.

(on camera): So all of this, all of this stuff, all of these machines, is duplicating the work of microbes.

NITTA: Yes, that's right.

MACKINNON: Wow.

NITTA: Wow.

MACKINNON: The dream behind this cutting edge facility may be the exploration of outer space, but the actual funding for this project is coming out of the deep pockets of Japan's nuclear power industry.

(voice-over): The Mini-Earth project is housed here in an out of the way part of northern Japan next to the site of an experimental nuclear reactor and a reprocessing facility for nuclear fuel. The Japanese government is funding a number of research projects related to the effects of radiation on the environment.

(on camera): So you have a lot of data about radioactivity and its absorption in the environment.

NITTA: Yes, yes.

MACKINNON (voice-over): Komatsubara and Shinohara will not be exposed to harmful radiation, but by tracing the movement of carbon dioxide through Mini-Earth and through their bodies, scientists can gain better understanding of how radioactive elements would behave in the event of a nuclear accident.

Carefully and cautiously working to perfect a completely self- contained and self-sustaining world, and if Mini-Earth is successful, something like it may one day help the earth's next generation of pioneers to boldly go and live where no man has lived before.

Rebecca MacKinnon, CNN, Rokkasho, Japan.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: Unfortunately, we have to come back down to earth because that's all we have time for.

If you want to get in touch, send an e-mail to Global.Challenges@cnn.com.

I'm Femi Oke. See you next time.

END

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