Daniel Kraft invents a better way to harvest bone marrow

Daniel Kraft is a paediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where his clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation. Bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of thousands of patients.

Few years ago, he was doing a transplant at Stanford. He was in the operating room; he had a person there, who was a volunteer donor. He took the needle, punch it into the hard bone and aspirate about 10 millimetres of bone marrow out, each time, with a syringe. After that he handed it to the nurse, she dropped it to a tin and handed it back to him. They repeated this about 200 times, and by the end the bone of the patient looked like Swiss cheese.

After few months he made up a new device, called Marrow Miner. This device can aspirate rich bone marrow very quickly trough one hole, and no robots are required. He experimented with other animals and he was astonished: he got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner, compared to the normal device. With this technology more people will donate them stem cells, and more people will be saved.

IS ENGLISH A MANIA?

Last Wednesday afternoon, I was playing football with my friends. An hour later Patxi told me: “sorry but I have to go to the English academy”, and then all my friends told me the same. Five minutes after all my friends had gone, and I was alone, with the ball. I started to think and I wondered: is English a mania?

In my view, English is absolutely a mania. It’s true that English is expanding all over the world, cause to internet and globalization, but in my opinion it’s excessive the mania of the parents signing up their children to the English academies. We can learn English at school, but a lot of parents think that if they don’t sign up their children in an academy, they won’t learn English.

However, it isn’t an obsession only of parents. If you want to apply for a job, they always ask you a certificate of English, and if you don’t have it, you won’t get the job. I believe that English is important nowadays to travel to other countries, have a better job…. But a lot of people are learning English before learning well his own language! And this is catastrophic: day by day English will delete all the languages in the world, all the cultures and all the traditions. We want that? I don’t think so.

To sum up, I agree that English is important these days, but it is more important to learn and use our language, if we don’t want to lose it.

English essay

A minute after Christina had entered the room, she knew something was wrong. The bedroom was dark and cold, the window was opened, shelves were empty, and all the books were on the floor. A person had been there, and he had been looking for something, but what?

Suddenly she knew what it was, the necklace she found two days ago. It was very beautiful, it glowed a lot and it had a diamond in the center, it seemed very expensive. She founded it in her garden, when she was playing with her dog, called Bryan. She picked it up and left it in a drawer of her room.

She ran to the drawer and opened it, the necklace was there. This meant only one thing, that person would return. She didn’t know what to do; she was so scared to call to the police.

Christina was sixteen years old; she has brown hair and green eyes. She was quite pretty. She lived with her mother, Sally. Christina’s dad died five years ago, in a traffic accident, when she was only eleven.

She cleaned her bedroom and go to sleep, without saying anything to her mother. Next morning she got up very tired, she hasn’t slept very well. She had breakfast while reading the newspaper. Suddenly she was astonished; in the newspaper was a picture of the necklace she found few days ago, it said: “a very expensive necklace was stolen last Wednesday, police is looking for the thief”.

She knew what to do. She called to the police and she told them she has found the necklace. She told them also that a person had been in her room looking for the necklace.

The police arrived very fast and they waited for the thief in Christina’s bedroom. At midnight a person opened the window. The policeman turned on the light and arrested the thief. Thanks to Christina the thief was arrested, and Christina was so happy for that.







THE END