Dave Hardy makes a comparison to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.  Eric Eyre says: “The University of Pittsburgh’s Applied Research Center, called U-PARC, appears to share the most similarities with the tech park in South Charleston.”  Other suggested comparisons: the Oklahoma State University-affiliated national sensor-testing center, the Michigan State University-led “bioeconomy” research and development center, and the University of Michigan’s biomedical research campus. Please, everyone, stop drinking the Tech Park water and answer some common sense questions.

• Is the combination of West Virginia University and Marshall University anywhere near the presence in research that the Duke University/University of North Carolina/North Carolina State University triumvirate are?  The University of Pittsburgh?  Michigan State University or the University of Michigan?  Let’s review one set of rankings: Among public universities, University of Michigan – 5, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill – 6, University of Pittsburgh – 11, Michigan State University – 22, North Carolina State University – 27.  Then, of course, you have Duke University and Carnegie-Mellon University near the top of the private institutions list.  Now check out WVU’s and MU’s rankings.  (This assignment requires persistence, folks.  Don’t quit so soon.)
• So we’re left with research mid-tier Oklahoma State University and the smallish ConocoPhillips-gifted national sensor testing center in Ponca City.  But at least Stillwater and Ponca City are within commuting distance of one another.  How about the South Charleston Technology Park?  There’s a smallish Marshall University Graduate College that doesn’t focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education next door, Marshall University an hour west, and West Virginia University two-and-three-quarters hours northeast.  Does the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission employ a single STEM researcher?  No.
• Next, I challenge remaining wishers and a hopers and a prayers who suggest that South Charleston can have a strong research park to take that two-and-three-quarter hour trip to Morgantown and visit their “research park” off Route 705 (aka “Where the Broomsedge Grows”).  Then go to Kinetic Park in Huntington for another tour.  If WVU, which has West Virginia’s strongest research presence, cannot make a go of a research park in its own back door, neither can South Charleston with none of Morgantown’s advantages besides a few more empty buildings.
• Finally, please note that there’s another dog that isn’t barking.  And that’s West Virginia University.  If any organization is critical to the Tech Park’s success, it’s WVU.  Where are they?  Where is MU?  Short of a MAJOR commitment by WVU, the longshot possibility becomes a virtual impossibility.

Having grown up in the Charleston area, I too would like to engage in a little wishin’ and a hopin’ and a prayin’, but my inferior Lincoln County education only taught me thinkin’, and it doesn’t take much thinkin’ to realize that a Research Triangle Park vision for the Tech Park is a pipe dream. It’s no accident that technology parks thrive only near major research universities.  We need to have realistic expectations for the South Charleston Technology Park’s possibility.

As I predicted, instead of unveiling their well-thought-out plan for the South Charleston Tech Center, leaders are scrambling to develop a plan.  One minute the Lottery Commission is moving there; the next minute it is not.  One minute a “mere” $1.8 million will be needed to operate the site; the next minute it’s closer to $7.8 million, and that doesn’t include renovations.  One minute Building 2000 needs to be leveled; the next minute it does not.

On the latter front, the Governor absurdly announced that the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission and Council for Community and Technical College Education would move to the site, while at the same time announcing that the only building that logically could house them would be leveled.

And now we have a TWO-PAGE environmental report that identifies contaminants and says “further evaluation is recommended,” but concludes that there are no “unacceptable human health risks” despite WVU’s conclusion a mere three years ago that the risks were serious.

The saddest thing here: No one apparently learned ANYTHING from the Governor’s 2006 announcement that WVU Institute of Technology was going to relocate its engineering program to this very site.  When I learned of that plan shortly before the Governor’s State-of-the-State Address announcement in 2006, I asked the leaders some of the most basic questions imaginable about how they were going to operate the site and meet basic student needs.  I was stunned to discover they had no answers.  I urged the leaders not to rush an announcement without a meaningful plan in place, but no one listened … and the rest is history. The Governor, WVU and WVUIT leaders made it very easy for the “Take Back Tech” folks to shut down that effort.

A mere four years later everyone is in a mad dash to make a multi-million decision by Friday.   As occurred in 2006, basic due diligence has not been performed.  And that’s a shame because the Governor finds himself in a precarious situation.  Take a wild gamble that property that Dow could not make profitable can be made profitable by the State of West Virginia and the environmental hazards really aren’t that bad, or risk the loss of important jobs unless MATRIC and other tenants can find suitable space somewhere else.

Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre quotes Paul Arbogast, chairman of tech park tenant Mid-Atlantic Technology Research and Innovation Center (MATRIC), saying, “it’s going to be an easy decision.”  I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Arbogast’s statement, if not his conclusion, if the decision truly has to be made by Friday.  I urge everyone involved to BEG, GROVEL, or do whatever is necessary to get Dow to give them two months to perform the due diligence that should have been performed months and years ago.  I’d personally even support having the State pay Dow for the two additional months of financial losses (about $1.3 million?) so it has time to get its due diligence house in order.  Otherwise, the State may lose a lot more than $1.3 million.

It’s no accident that Dow is not only offering to “give away” this property but also throw in $10 million to boot.  And it’s no accident that no one learned anything from the events of 2006.  How sad!

• Dow Chemical Co. pays $10 million annually ($7.8 million net) for upkeep, but the State’s going to manage to reduce that amount to $1.8-$1.9 million?  Who says the government isn’t more efficient than the private sector?!?  Still a deficit mind you, but a pretty amazing proposed accomplishment by the agile and efficient public sector.
• The State is going to tear down an old building.  Who’s paying for that?
• Dow is throwing in $10 million to get rid of the property?!?  Because they’re such strong supporters of the State of West Virginia and the Kanawha Valley?  Someone might want to check with the Valley’s many former Dow employees.
• The State will use federal stimulus money to convert one building into a “green” building and save $1 million in heating costs?  How much will that cost?  How long will it take to accomplish?
• “I still think it could serve as a catalyst for West Virginia University and Marshall University.”  Just like the West Virginia University Research Park and Huntington’s Kinetic Park?
• “He said it is projected that by the end of 2012 the park will be home to 300 jobs with an average salary of $100,000 a year.”  I’d love to see the basis for those projections.
• “The governor said he’s asked stakeholders to come back Monday with recommendations on what should be torn down, renovated or otherwise changed.  He promised that all of the figures will be made public … WHEN THE STATE HAS A FINAL PLAN.”  (Emphasis mine, of course.)

I think we have our answer.  The Governor did not need to use the word “FINAL.”  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.  I hope everyone can come up with a plan before next Tuesday.

Dow obviously has determined that it cannot operate the South Charleston Tech Center profitably, whether as a research park or as far more mundane rental property. Potential buyers that Dow has courted over the years surely have reached much the same conclusion, or the property would have sold long ago.

So what makes the “Friends of the Tech Park” think they are going to be able to turn things around? Some really basic questions:

• How much revenue does the site currently generate?
• How much does the site currently cost to operate?
• What are the ongoing maintenance costs for the facilities?  The deferred maintenance costs?
• How much additional revenue is going to be generated next year?  Two years from now?  Five years from now?
• Who is going to provide that revenue?  The private sector?  Government agencies?
• What is going to change to make the property a mecca for private sector companies?  Is the “mecca”-nization of the property going to cost anything?  If so, from whence is that money coming?
• How is the property going to be marketed?  Is a “government” park going to attract non-government tenants?
• How is West Virginia’s higher education research establishment, which on its best day is not spoken of in the same breath as North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park research establishment, unless, that is, Charleston Newspapers are providing the coverage, going to support this effort?
• Isn’t the movement of government offices anywhere largely a zero-sum game unless someone expects to hire a lot more government employees?  What’s going to happen to all the rental property currently housing government employees?  Why is this mass move of government agencies a net positive?
• What makes anyone think the Higher Education Policy Commission, which owns a single piece of property that has not been well-maintained, or state government, which owns a lot of poorly maintained properties, is going to be able to turn things around?
• How is the environmental calculus that led West Virginia University to decline a “gift” of much of this property different now?

There might be a beautifully bound plan that answers every last one of these questions in exquisite detail and contains every chart and graph I’d ever want.  But if so, why is no one quoted in the newspapers mentioning it?  And why is no reporter asking for it?

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes solves the case based on the fact that a dog did not bark.  In this case, no one seems to be noticing the eerie silence.

The story concerns the South Charleston Technology Park, about which I have written before.  The Governor and his friends have hatched a plan to save the Tech Park, in part by moving a significant number of state government offices there.  But Judge Berger ruled several years ago when the West Virginia Lottery Commission tried to move its offices to Teays Valley that the West Virginia Constitution, which declares the seat of government to be Charleston (Article 6, Section 20), prohibited such a move.  While technically in South Charleston, the Tech Park is literally feet, not even miles, from Charleston and a mere five-minute drive from the State Capitol Complex itself.

The Governor basically dared anyone to sue, but several Charleston politicians made it clear that they were ready to take that dare.  Then some Charleston politicians hatched a plan to annex a portion of the Technology Park, but the City of South Charleston balked.  All this craziness because of Judge Berger’s flawed ruling.

Stop and think for a minute:

• At one extreme, no one could argue with a straight face that every single state government job should be housed within the four corners of Charleston.  After all, all major government agencies have offices scattered throughout the state, and the state’s citizens are better off as a result.
• At the other extreme, it would be hard to argue that West Virginia’s elected state officials should be headquartered outside of the State Capitol Complex, much less Charleston.
• Should statutorily-created Cabinet-level offices be required to be housed in Charleston?  No.  If the West Virginia Constitution’s framers did not see fit to require these offices, they almost surely wouldn’t view them as important enough to justify a requirement that they be housed in Charleston.  A clear, easy-to-apply standard that can be justified with a reasonably logical argument.
• But do realize that the Lottery Commission itself is not a Cabinet-level office.  It is one level down organizationally under the auspices of the West Virginia Department of Revenue.  Just like the Division of Rehabilitation Services, headquartered in Institute, and the Division of Tourism, headquartered in South Charleston.  If Judge Berger’s ruling applies to the Lottery Commission, it logically applies to Rehab Services and Tourism, too.
• Having said that, if I were a legislator, I would sponsor a bill that lists government agencies that can be headquartered outside of Charleston because the relevant provision of the West Virginia Constitution contains five important words: “unless otherwise provided by law.”
• And having said that, I seriously wonder whether Judge Berger’s wrong-headed decision may have prevented state politicians from making a wrong-headed decision of their own to take over a Tech Park that’s unlikely to flourish under the best of circumstances – an opinion that many of my friends do not share, but which seems pretty obvious to me.

While I am generally sympathetic to the Sierra Club cause, I think their opposition to these gifts is wrong-headed.  In my perfect world, West Virginia University, which actually has a competitive advantage in the field of energy research, would become a leader in the alternative and renewable energy fields.  To do that, they need money from people in the energy industry – and for good or ill, that includes people like Murray and Blankenship, who at least understand the potential benefits of energy research, even if their statements about global warming and other issues are far afield.

It would be great if higher education institutions never took money from benefactors who did not-so-good things, but we wouldn’t have some of the world’s finest educational institutions without the benefit of some ill-gotten gains – Duke University (built by tobacco), Carnegie Mellon University, and Rockefeller University, just to name a few.

Everywhere you turn in the higher education world, you hear policy makers trumpeting the importance of producing more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates.  Indeed Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a significant report issued by the National Academies several years ago, argued that America was on the verge of losing its competitive edge because it was not producing enough STEM graduates and urged national goal-setting.

After reviewing thirty years of educational and labor data, however, the Rutgers and Georgetown researchers have concluded that we’re producing more than enough STEM graduates.  The problem, if there is any, is that fewer than half of STEM graduates work in STEM fields 10 years after they graduate.

I have a hunch this is an important study (I’m not saying it’s correct, just important) that will receive little additional attention as states like West Virginia charge headlong into STEM graduate program expansion.  I make this observation in part because no one seems to have paid any attention to published data that suggest that West Virginia loses an overwhelming number of its STEM graduates to other states, making West Virginia’s return on its hefty STEM investment very poor.

(a)   The Journal of the American Medical Association?

(b)   The New England Journal of Medicine?

(c)   Brain: A Journal of Neurology?

(d)   The Journal of Neuroscience?

(e)   GQ?

If you guessed (e), you, of course, are correct.  In between articles titled “Why We’re Wild About Olivia Wilde: A Sexy Video and Exclusive Photos,” “I Kissed a Teenage Lesbian (and I Liked It)” and “Me Talk Presidential One Day” (I wonder which of these three links is destined to become my blog’s most clicked link ever) is an article titled “Game Brain” about Dr. Bailes’s research.

It is my understanding that West Virginia Mountaineer football coach Bill Stewart will be in attendance. He hopes to turn back time to Saturday night so that his team can have another chance to hold on to the football.

In his new book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur questions our notion of that great buzzword “innovation.”  Says Arthur:

There isn’t a deep understanding of innovation out there.  And I think you can see that because the way innovation is described is very hand-wavy, and-then-something-creative-happens.  All societies want to be innovative, but in the absence of any deep idea of innovation, governments and companies tend to run after what seems to be the latest idea; that if you somehow have, ‘creativity,’ or invest in R&D, or set up industrial parks, that’s going to work.

In his book review, Lee Drutman explains the book’s basic argument this way:

New technology is just combining old technologies in new ways.  And all technology is, at its core, simply the harnessing of nature and its manifold phenomena for human needs.

He goes on to say:

The key implication … is that … innovations do not come out of nowhere.  ”There are not magic wands or bright ideas in bathtubs,” Arthur said….  Rather, innovation is something that comes from the hard work of decades and decades of education and training.  It is something that comes from devoting lots of resources to universities and investing in loads of basic science.

In other words, there is no “magic” shortcut to business innovation, contrary to what you might hear at the next economic development conference you attend.

I note in reviewing the WVU Foundation website that the Research Trust Fund is dead last on the gift priorities drop-down list and doesn’t even make the “donate online” list, even though the State of West Virginia matches those contributions dollar for dollar.  I thought research funding was one of WVU’s top priorities.  Does the Foundation not agree?  Whatever else you might say about Robert Murray, and a lot is being said, he made the most of his contribution to WVU.

Bob Murray is the President of Murray Energy Corporation.  Murray Energy owns Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine, where nine people lost their lives in August 2007.  You may remember that Mr. Murray initially came across as a sympathetic character in media broadcasts, but opinions changed as the investigation unfolded and it became clear that the accident was the result of serious safety violations and $1.6 million in fines were imposed against the mine operator.

As you would expect, WVU accepted the money and said nothing about Mr. Murray’s controversial past.  I think they did the right thing.

• U.S. News and World Report places WVU in the third tier (of four) among national universities and its law school in the third tier among all law schools.  (WVU’s law school was in the fourth tier a few years ago, so this is progress.)
• The Princeton Review ranks WVU sixth nationally in terms of partying and eighth in terms of beer affinity.  Apparently seeking to add a little humor to the discussion of partying and beer affinity, the Quick and the Ed blog recently published the graduation rates of the Princeton Review’s beer-loving and beer-hating schools and found that students at beer-loving institutions had an average six-year graduation rate of 77.5 percent, while those at beer-hating institutions had a 63 percent graduation rate.  The one anomaly among the beer-loving schools: WVU with a 55 percent graduation rate.  (Partying schools, by contrast, had lower graduation rates than non-partying schools thanks in part to WVU’s lower-than-average graduation rate.)
• The Washington Monthly ranks schools in terms of their contribution to the public good: (1) Social Mobility: How well do colleges perform at recruiting and graduating low-income students?; (2) Research: How well do colleges do at producing cutting-edge scholarship and Ph.Ds?; and (3) Service: Do colleges encourage students to give back to their country?  Where does West Virginia University rank among national universities?  162 out of 258.  Interestingly, WVU does a slightly better-than-average job of graduating students when one considers the percentage of students receiving Pell grants.  Where does West Virginia University do really badly?  In federal work-study funds spent on service and in faculty both receiving significant research awards and in the National Academies.

So how will West Virginia University rank in the soon-to-be-released National Research Council (National Academies) rankings of various graduate programs, which are widely considered to be the most statistically rigorous and credible rankings around?  You don’t have to wait for the results.  I provided the answer on 26 June 2009.

Two weeks ago the New York Times published an article suggesting that drug-related research conflicts of interest may be fairly common.  And again it was litigation – this time against Wyeth for selling Premarin and PremPro, two hormone replacement treatments for women – that uncovered the conflict.  In 2002 a federal study of hormone replacement therapy was stopped after researchers discovered that the hormones increased risks for breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.  The year previous to the federal study Wyeth made $2 billion from the sale of those drugs.  To aid sales, Wyeth apparently was arranging to have ghost-written articles produced singing the praises of these treatments.  In all 26 such scientific papers appeared in 18 medical journals with no disclosure.  The amount of editing done by the “authors” of these articles varied from substantial to minimal.

How widespread is the problem?  A New York Times article published this week says: “Recent revelations suggest that the practice is widespread.  Dozens of medical education companies across the country draft scientific papers at the behest of drug makers.  And placing such papers in medical journals has become a fundamental marketing practice for most of the large pharmaceutical companies.”

A student caught doing the same thing would face serious punishment up to and including expulsion from a school with an honor code.  What will happen to these authors?  According to Dr. Carl Elliott with the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, they “never seem to be punished at all.”

If Senator Charles Grassley has his way, that will change.  He sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health last week urging them to crack down on the practice.  If NIH would punish institutions that fail to address such practices by denying them grants, this practice would stop very quickly.

While it was necessary for large corporations like IBM, GE, Hewlett-Packard and Union Carbide to bring together talent into mega-research parks in a bygone era, the need is less critical now as research, communication and social networks easily can be created electronically.  One exception, according to experts: “[T]ight-knit teams inside corporate labs … can outshine the open model when working on multidisciplinary challenges in projects soon heading to market.”

The article suggests that it’s probably a better strategy to lure a number of MATRIC-size organizations and start-ups, rather than large national and multi-national corporation research units, to the South Charleston Tech Center.

What’s going on?  In part, it relates to a NASA Office of Inspector General’s report alleging that WJU misspent millions of dollars in federal grant funds.  As I understand it, the Inspector General accuses WJU of, among other things, double-dipping – charging more than 100% of people’s salaries to a grant.  The allegations surround spending for the institution’s Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center (NTTC).

NTTC was established in 1989 to link federal labs and universities with technologies to industries that might be able to use them.  Stop right there and ask yourself a question: Why on earth would a National Technology Transfer Center be located at Wheeling Jesuit University and not at or near a major research university or at the very least at West Virginia University if located in West Virginia?

The first hint is at the beginning of the Center’s name: United States Senator Robert C. Byrd.  Senator Byrd, who considers the moniker “King of Pork” a badge of honor, has long had a very close relationship with Father Thomas Acker, one of WJU’s previous presidents (they’ve gone through quite a few lately), and he arranged to have NTTC located at WJU because of that relationship.

While we in West Virginia are proud of our Senior Senator’s ability to bring home the bacon, we should ask ourselves: At what cost?  Should a small institution like WJU be put in charge of a National Technology Transfer Center?  How will WJU, which was already struggling financially (if a reporter did some digging, he or she might find some interesting correspondence from the United States Department of Education on this subject), survive as it tries to pay NASA back millions of dollars misspent funds?

The New York Times reported last week that our machines are becoming smarter than we, and scientists are debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems.  A threat?  Not for a while, I would hope.

The New York Times also reported last week that traders like Goldman Sachs – the bad guys in case you don’t know about the internet bubble, housing bubble and oil bubble – are beginning to make a lot of money by subtly manipulating share prices with high-speed, high-frequency trading.  The issue came to light when a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer left with secret computer codes, which a federal prosecutor now claims could be used to “manipulate markets in unfair ways.”  Hhhmmm?!?  If the programmer could use them to manipulate markets in unfair ways, how was Goldman Sachs using them?  A threat?  Yes, and now.

On Sunday, Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre wrote about the Dow Technology Center.  The article was titled “Supporters try to save South Charleston Tech Park,” which says about all that needs to be said about the current status of the Tech Center.

Unlike Kinetic Park and the WVU Research Park, which have never succeeded in getting off the ground, the Dow Tech Center has a storied past.  Located on a relatively flat area between I-64 and Corridor G in South Charleston, the Union Carbide Tech Center opened in 1949; employed as many as 3,500 chemists, technicians, researchers and engineers in its heyday; and produced more than 30,000 patents worth $18 billion, according to the article.  Intriguingly, this was done in an area without a research university or a significant educational pipeline of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates.  (Nearby West Virginia Tech produced engineering graduates, but not in the quantities or advanced degrees needed to support a major research facility.)

Over the last several decades, the South Charleston Tech Center has fallen on hard times.  With the exception of the Mid-Atlantic Technology Research and Innovation Center (MATRIC), with about 150 employees, not much remains of the Tech Center.  The article quotes a MATRIC employee as saying: “There’s a lot of intellectual capital left in the valley.  This is an ideal place for technology development.  It’s like Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.”  I don’t think this assessment is correct.  While Union Carbide invested millions, if not billions, of dollars in the Tech Center and brought smart people from all over the nation and world to the Kanawha Valley, it is very unlikely that another private sector entity would do the same.  Why not?

• Intellectual Capital.  Unlike Research Triangle Park, which is surrounded by Duke University, the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University, the Tech Center is surrounded by West Virginia State University and the University of Charleston, neither of which has the kinds of strong STEM programs needed to support the Tech Center, and West Virginia University Institute of Technology, which has some of the programs, but is struggling at best, dying at worst.  Furthermore, WVU-Tech’s last foray in the direction of the Dow Tech Center was an unmitigated disaster; just ask the “Take Back Tech” folks.
• Environmental Issues.  Having been aware of at least two efforts to assess environmental conditions at the Center, I know there are widely divergent opinions.  Clearly, there are serious environmental issues associated with a sediment pond on the property.  Beyond that, some people think the site is quite habitable.  Regardless, any time an environmental cloud hangs over a piece of property, it presents serious challenges for any marketer of that property.
• The Owner.  Dow Chemical, which owns the property, faces a financial dilemma.  It has a series of old buildings on property that is of little use to it now, and there’s no single buyer on the horizon willing to take all the property off its hands.  So rather than continue to maintain buildings that are partially occupied, Dow is beginning to level them to reduce maintenance costs.  Additionally, Dow is not the easiest company with which to deal on property issues, I have been told.

Keeping with our dermatological theme, can West Virginia University and/or Marshall University provide the necessary chemical peel?  No.  Neither institution has the critical research mass needed on its home campus.  If significant institutional resources were redirected to South Charleston, it probably would weaken both institutions’ current research-building efforts.  Additionally, there is little likelihood of a new infusion of external resources at either institution to support such an endeavor.

Can West Virginia’s state government provide the necessary chemical peel?  Not without taking an incredible risk.  If the property ended up in the hands of the State, the State also would inherit a set of old facilities that need to be maintained and some serious environmental questions.  Additionally, the State would have to find a significant number of new tenants for the site.  All one has to do is tour facilities on the Capitol Complex to appreciate what a poor landlord the State historically has been.

What’s the best-case scenario?  Create a consortium of educational and private sector organizations in addition to MATRIC to serve as anchor tenants at the Tech Center.  On the education front, create a higher education center, much like the one in Beckley, which has the potential to thrive and grow, and locate the Kanawha Valley’s new Advanced Technology Center on the site.  On the private sector front, market, market, market the Center to anyone and everyone who might have the slightest interest.  It’s a long shot, but I think it’s probably the best shot we have.

The strangest part of the WSAZ story concerned site infrastructure.  Dr. Susan Touma, the on-site dermatologist (an anchor tenant for nerdy technology types?), told the reporter: “We had phone lines put in and a lot of different other things that weren’t in place.”  WSAZ went on to report that contractors were just laying cable for TV and high speed internet access yesterday.  How on earth can you claim to have a technology park when you don’t even have high speed internet access available on your site?  I had always assumed that Kinetic Park had not succeeded because of the lack of needed entrepreneurial talent in Huntington.  Now I learn it may have been the lack of internet?

Before anyone in Morgantown laughs about the plight of Huntington’s Kinetic Park, please take a tour of the West Virginia University Research Park on Route 705 in what otherwise is a booming area of Morgantown.  According to a November 2002 WVU press release about the Research Park, then Vice President for Research John Weete said: “It is fully expected that the WVU Research Park will become a self-sufficient, cost-effective, world-class center of research, technology development, commercialization and business activity resulting from strong links between the park occupants and the intellectual capital of WVU”  … in “multi-tenant buildings totaling approximately 650,000 square feet of space.”  This quote is not intended to be a clue to help you locate the site.  All I can say is: Look for the West Virginia equivalent of sagebrush.  If any place has the sagebrush market cornered, it’s West Virginia University’s Research Park.

As someone will surely tell me, the heartbreak of psoriasis is no laughing matter.  We need to figure out why Kinetic Park, WVU’s Research Park and the Dow Technology Center in South Charleston are in their present conditions and what, if anything, we might be able to do to change it.

This week’s edition contains an interesting article about some federally-funded research conducted by WVU health sciences faculty who also moonlight as expert witnesses in railroad workers’ solvents exposure cases.

Several points worth making:

• For those of you who think lawyers are whores, you haven’t met a real whore until you’ve met some of the “expert” witnesses that are paraded regularly through our courtroom doors.  Indeed in all my years associated with the legal system, I can think of only a handful of times when an expert produced an opinion that was inconsistent with what the person paying his or her bill wanted him or her to find.
• The work of James Turner and others in exposing the WVU researchers’ questionable work is an example of fine lawyering.  Lawyers have to become experts themselves to challenge expert witnesses effectively.  Mr. Turner appears to have left no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of this matter.
• If the allegations are true, several remedies are available to address it.  There are federal criminal and civil penalties for research fraud and/or misuse of federal funds, as well as penalties for perjury.  Furthermore, WVU has a system whereby tenured faculty can be stripped of both tenure and their jobs if allegations like these turn out to be true.  Finally, courts can sanction lawyers and others who knowingly perpetrate frauds like this on the court.
• I note that Mr. Turner hired as his expert a University of Michigan neurology professor.  The University of Michigan is one of the nation’s premier research universities  and member of the Association of American Universities.  See “To Research or Not to Research?  That Is the Question.”

The gravamen of the story is that NCI is funding research that is”safe” and unlikely to provide much in the way of advances for cancer prevention or cures.  ”It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the understanding that the focus will be on small projects unlikely to make significant steps toward curing cancer,” says the New York Times.

My favorite research topic on NCI’s website: “Arctic.”  Some studies you might not want to look at if you’re hoping to find a cure for cancer: “Management of Insomnia in Cancer Patients” and “Spousal Support, Emotional Disclosure, and Adjustment to Head and Neck Cancer,”  I, of course, am cherry picking, but even a cursory review of funded projects suggests that NCI is not funding much high risk/high reward research.

It is very important that NCI spend its money wisely because it provides far more money than any other organization for cancer research.  By comparison to NCI’s $105 billion since 1971, the American Cancer Society has spent $3.4 billion since 1946, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile … people are dying.

28 June 2009.  Further reading from the same edition of the New York Times: “New Treatment for Cancer Shows Promise in Testing.”   From where are the lead researchers?  Australia.

I have mixed feelings about Dr. Berdahl’s proposal.  On the one hand, I think every higher education institution should be free to compete for scarce research grant dollars from NSF, NIH and other organizations.  If there is any arena in which free market and merit principles should operate, it is in the fields of education and research.  On the other hand, I know that Congress has provided more and more institutions with earmarks for research without regard to merit and that West Virginia University and Marshall University both have struggled to come up with the modest amounts of matching funds required by West Virginia’s own Research Trust Fund program, which suggests that neither institution is ready to move into the upper echelons of American research universities any time soon.

*West Virginia University is listed in the Carnegie classification system as having “high,” rather than “very high,” research activity, which places it behind at least 96 other higher education institutions in terms of research activity.  Additionally, West Virginia University will not appear anywhere on the soon-to-be-released and very prestigious National Research Council rankings of graduate programs at over 222 higher education institutions because it didn’t even participate!  I challenge someone to review the list and attempt to identify ONE other state without a participating institution (HINT: There is one other state.) or ONE of West Virginia University’s peer institutions that did not participate.  More on this subject when the rankings are released.