by Staff Writers San Francisco CA (SPX) Dec 20, 2012 By fitting
a "smart" mobile phone with magnifying optics, bioengineers at
the University of California, Berkeley created a real "cell"
phone, a diagnostic-quality microscope that can be used by
clinics in developing countries and inside - and outside -
American biology classrooms, according to Eva M. Schmid, PhD,
who described the development of CellScope at the American
Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Dr.
Schmid, who is in the bioengineering and biophysics lab of
Daniel Fletcher, PhD, said that the UC Berkeley researchers
initially envisioned a mobile phone-microscope so rugged that it
could be used for high-resolution imaging outside traditional
laboratory environments, especially for disease diagnostics in
developing countries. But, after a chance encounter with a
secondary school science teacher, Dr. Schmid and her colleagues
decided to evaluate CellScope in an alternate environment: a
middle school science classroom at the San