Transcript:

There's a new pill that's being tested by medical experts right now. But what's inside the pill isn't medicine, it's a camera designed to take pictures from inside your body. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont. Scientists in Israel have built a tiny camera, a lighting system, and a transmitter strong enough to send messages through the body, to waiting video monitors. After this entire device is coated in plastic, it's only about 30 millimeters long -- not much bigger than most over-the-counter pills. Right now, its battery lasts for 6 hours -- only about a quarter of the time that it spends inside the human body. Gastroenterologist Dr. Paul Swain is with Given Imaging in Israel. He conducted the initial trials of the camera in a pill, and speaks about the future of this device.

"We'd like to improve the performance of the capsule so that we can see the stomach rather better than we do. We'd also like to work so that we can get really good views of the whole of the colon. But the challenge there is that we need a longer duration of the capsule to get images from the colon. And then we'd like to do biopsies, or do tests as we go through the colon, so if we see something, we may be able to find out whether it's a cancer, and then transmit that information remotely. We're hoping to be able to move the capsule by using electrostimulation, and we have done some studies which show that if you stimulate the gut, you can actually cause contraction, and this will propel it backwards as well as forwards. So the idea of a little camera robot wandering around backwards and forwards inside the gut, is what we would like to aim to achieve."

Dr. Swain hopes that the new pill will be put to use in hospitals within the next year. Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support provided by the National Science Foundation.