It's a sad familiar story. Undergraduates come in as freshmen with dreams of devising a way to cure the world's water problems or desinging a car that runs on batteries.

By the time they are a senior, their main ambition is to be a product manager, or go into sales.

In an effort to re-emphasize the role of science and research, UC Berkeley's engineering school has launched a program that, ideally, will allow approximately 50 percent of the undergraduates to participate in research projects, said S. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering during a meeting with reporters and researchers at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).  

Right now, only about 15 percent to 18 percent of undergrads participate in research projects and in some instances, that involvement can be reduced to photocopying stuff for grad students.

If the students become more engaged in sciences, you've increased the odds that they may pursue a career that will involve technological innovation, said Sastry.

CITRIS essentially serves the same purpose. The organization tries to identify promising research projects and then instead of getting professors or graduate students write papers on their findings, they are encouraged to take them through a trial. In the conventional tech transfer model, sometimes projects get stranded between the research, development and testing phases, Sastry said.

One group of researchers, for instance, showed me a device called the cellscope. It is a cell phone attached to a microscope. They are integrated by metal fasteners. (Think of the camera phone from Flight of the Conchords.). Blood samples can be put on a slide, placed in front of the microscope and then the images can be relayed to researchers in a hospital with the camera in the cell phone. The resolution on an ordinary two megapixel camera will do.

Ideally, it will help doctors be able to identify and chart the spread of outbreaks of tuberculosis or malaria (or swine flu) in high risk areas. Test workers in a meat packing plant? It could help stop some big public health problems.

It was recently tested in the Congo. "I was on top of a volcano and I was getting five bars. That's better reception than I get at home," said Erik Douglas, the grad student working on the project. More trials are coming.