Cover of the Adventures Among Ants, by Dr. Mark W. Moffett.

Not many scientists beg perfect strangers to eat the species they study. But that’s just what “Doctor Bugs” did when visiting tourist-magnet ruins in Cambodia. Dr. Mark W. Moffett proffered a dish of scrumptious crackers topped with herbs and, um, plump ant larvae to passersby — at times literally pleading with them to try it. It’s just one of the ways the world-famed ecologist, and Smithsonian Institution research associate, gets people to stop and notice the trillions of ants that share our world.

Moffett’s comedic showman personality was on display in full force on Tuesday night as he entertained an auditorium full of people at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences with stories about ants. And boy does he have stories. There’s the time he snaked a small camera attached to a long cable into a nest of weaver ants, capturing engaging footage of the ants at work… the camera pushed farther and farther past hundreds of ants, until ants swarmed the other end of the cable and overran him. The footage ended abruptly with audio of Moffett yelping in pain. Then there’s the time he stepped barefoot on a pair of ant forceps in his camp and spent the day worrying he’d been bitten by a poisonous snake, a fair concern considering there was a nest within a foot of his hammock. And let’s not forget the time he actually did sit on the world’s most poisonous snake in South America, too engrossed with photographing ants to notice.”If you must sit on a poisonous snake, sit closest to their head,” Moffett deadpanned to the crowd. “It’s the best way. It’s the only way.”

National Geographic cartoon of Moffet squatting on a pit viper.

More often, Moffett’s stories are about the ants themselves — their diverse ways of sensing the world, interacting, and divvying up labor to achieve survival goals efficiently. Moffett’s high-energy slide show was centered around promoting his new book, Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari With a Cast of Trillions, published by the University of California Press.

“Ants differ from us in that the individual doesn’t matter, it’s all about what’s good for the group,” Moffett said. But they’re colonies are a lot like our cities, he went on to explain, drawing analogies between small cities/small ant colonies and large cities/large ant colonies. In smaller colonies, where there is less specialization of labor, each ant has to be a jack-of-all-trades and perform a variety of tasks.”They have their toolboxes built-in to their faces,” Moffett said, flashing a picture of a type of trap-jaw ant with extra long pitch-fork tipped jaws. It uses the long levers to pick up struggling prey and carry it safely back to the nest. But a much smaller, second pair of jaws tucked closer to its mouth allows it to eat.

Larger colonies, like our larger cities, tend to have more job specialization, Moffett said. Scientists can often tell what role they play by their size. Sometimes the largest ants of the same species outweigh the smallest ones by 500 times. The goliath ants are often used to deliver the death blow (a sting, or a bite) in battles with other ants or interlopers, and even act as “school busses,” allowing smaller ants in their colony to hitch rides. “Basically, it’s more energy efficient for the colony if the smaller ants ride on the bigger ants,” Moffett explained.

Leaf cutter ants cooperate to bring leaf fragments to their underground nests, where "gardener" ants cultivate a fungus upon the decaying vegetation. The colony harvests and eats the fungus. (Photo by Dr. Mark W. Moffett)

He also talked about various ways that ants work together, like the free-diving ants in Borneo that live in pitcher plants. They fetch crickets out of the water pooling in a pitcher’s basin, then haul it to the lip of the pitcher where they stash it and have a feast. The crickets are often too large for the pitcher plants to digest, he explained, so the ants are doing the plant a favor by saving it from experiencing an overdose of acid as the cricket decays. “They’re basically antacids for the plant,” Moffett joked.”But they also must have the strongest toes in the world to carry these large crickets up the slope of the pitcher plant, which is made so that insects will fall into its trap.” Ants also form chains to create living bridges that they use to cross from one tree to another high amid the canopies of rainforest trees, hundreds of feet from the forest floor. And some ants will sacrifice themselves to fill “pot holes” along highways the colony uses to move things to and from their nest. Then there are the leaf cutter ants, which divvy up leaf harvesting and fungus cultivating duties like nobody’s business (see photo at right).

Moffett’s photographs have been widely published and he often contributes work to National Geographic magazine. He searches for images that tell a story within their frames, he said, like the one he took of a battle between two ant species that shows a Goliath ant fending off attacks from smaller ants, with the carnage of warfare in the background: headless ants frozen mid-stride, and ants with their torso’s chopped in two and legs torn asunder. He encouraged the kids in the audience to “not lose that weird point of view you have when young,” because it can be valuable to being a scientist. He credits his own path to biology and entomology with reading too many Jane Goodall adventure books when younger, and climbing too many trees.

Moffett’s talk deftly distilled insights about ant ecology and social interactions into anecdotes that enthralled kids and adults like me who are in touch with their inner kids. If you missed his talk, you did miss out — but don’t sweat it, you can always order the book.

MORE MOFFET, LINKS:
Moffett on NPR’s Fresh Air; June 17, 2010
The hidden world of ants, Smithsonian Magazine; July 2009

In my house, if I don't write it down then it doesn't get done. Period.

Day-dreaming during work often means you miss out on what is going on around you while your mind drifts, but a new study suggests that day-dreaming may also impair your ability to retain information acquired just prior to embarking on your mental mini-journey.

Peter Delaney, a professor of psychology at the Univ. of N.C.-Greensboro, led a team of researchers in probing what’s called the “amnesic effect” of day-dreaming by doing two simple experiments with college students.

In the first experiment, the team asked the students to memorize word lists, then they asked them to day-dream about their parents’ house or about their own house. In the second experiment, they asked them to memorize word lists and then day-dream about either an international or a domestic vacation. In each experiment, the disparity in the cognitive meanderings was set up to test whether mental distance had any effect upon the mind’s ability to recall the word lists.

The results are intriguing because the students whose thoughts dawdled on long-distance vacations performed much worse at recalling the word lists than those that thought of domestic getaways. Likewise, the students who lingered on thoughts of their parents home tended to also fare worse at the memory recall tasks than those who day-dreamed about their own homes.

What might explain this disparity? According to the authors, the experiment did not test only physical distance. Rather, it was set up to test mental distance from the reality of a moment, whether that distance was induced by geography, time or even cultural context. Psychologists dub this the “context-change account” of directed forgetting. The authors explain, “The context-change account proposes that shifting one’s thoughts to something different such as a diversionary thought sets up a new mental context in which subsequent items are encoded.” And this mental-context shift causes your mind to peter out at recalling the information acquired from the previous mental context.

Because past research shows that physically moving from one environment to another can produce forgetting, the researchers wanted to look at what happens when people travel through mental space and time. They hypothesized that merely imagining a change in physical location might induce forgetting because people tend to “immerse themselves in the context of that event.” And they figured that the more difference there was between the reality of where a person is in space and time, and where they travel to mentally, then the greater degree of recently encoded information that might be nixed.

With the amount of day-dreaming that I do daily, this makes me wonder how I manage to remember anything at all. Oh yes, post-it notes. Lots of post-it notes.

Moral of the story? If you day-dream at work, and wish to keep your job, try to anchor that drifting mind closer to your cubicle.

NOTES:

Peter F. Delaney, Lili Sahakyan, Colleen M. Kelley, and Carissa A. Zimmerman. 2010. Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming. Psychological Science. 21(7) 1036–1042. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610374739.

Dan Vorhaus

Dan Vorhaus is a lawyer with Robinson Bradshaw and Hinson in Charlotte, N.C. where a portion of his practice comprises the growing field of personal genomics law. Given the interest in personal genomics in the Triangle, I thought I’d create an expanded version of the short question-and-answer interview I did with him for an up-coming issue of the Sci-Tech section in the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer (be on the lookout for that next Monday in print and online), and post it here. Vorhaus also authors the Genomics Law Report, a blog about the legal side of personal genomics, and he will be giving testimony to the Food and Drug Administration in the near future as the agency attempts to sort out particulars of how it plans to regulate genomic diagnostic testing.

How did you become interested in concentrating on personal genomics as an area of the law?
I have a master’s in bioethics; I did that degree before I went to law school. So as I started thinking about the areas of law and policy that were most interesting to me, that was clearly one of them. And it seemed like there was a tremendous opportunity for a field that is developing and emerging and creating all sorts of new and exciting legal issues. And it’s something that I’ve always had an interest in the underlying science and technology, and I was fortunate enough in law school to start working with some real pioneers in the field, specifically George Church in the personal genome field. Everything sort of built from there. Now, it’s how I make my living, it’s my career. And I love it. It’s something new and fascinating every single day and I can’t get enough of it.

It sounds like the bioethics degree had a big influence on you.
It did, although I already had this interest before, that was what caused me to pursue the bioethics degree. And I knew I was going to law school. I kind of applied those two things simultaneously. So, they have kind of worked together simultaneously. And I decided kind of early on that I was more interested in pursuing the law than some of the pure policy or philosophy or ethical issues behind a lot of these technologies. I think there is a real need… One thing you find with the law is that new areas tend to lag in new areas of technology and new areas of social development. And that is certainly true in the areas of personal genomics, personalized medicine, there is a long way for the law to go to catch up to where science and technology already are. And they continue to press on ahead. And the law continues to play catch up. So it seems that there is a real opportunity to be involved in helping to lay the legal framework for what I think will be important and meaningful technologies and services in people lives for years and decades to come.

That formalizes what I had suspected, with some of the things I’ve read about the Myriad ruling and the FDA announcing its intent to regulate direct-to-consumer genomic testing, it does seem that these formal regulations and policies are lagging behind the business practices.
That’s right. Both the examples you gave, the Myriad litigation — and really, the state of biotechnology patents more broadly – and the FDA and Congress’s involvement in genetic testing, especially consumer genetic testing, both of those are areas where there is a lot of uncertainty right now whether the law today is doing as good a job as it could be as far as protecting individuals and enabling commerce, and really striking the right balance between allowing the science and the technology to press forward while making sure that we have the right protections in place for people using these technologies. That is always going to be a tension in this area, I don’t ever foresee that dissipating; but that does not mean that we should work any less hard to get that balance as close as we can as quickly as we can.

You’ve posted about the Myriad gene patent litigation, in which a federal judge invalidated patents that Myriad held for human genes, BRCA-1 and BRCA-2, which are used to test for the likelihood of developing breast cancer. What was the most unusual thing about this ruling, because it seems to have caused quite a splash?
You’re right, it does cause a splash, but I would say the splash that it caused is probably greater than its legal significance, at least for right now. It’s important to keep in mind that this was a district court ruling, so without getting to much into the weeds, there is a long way to go with this litigation before it gets to the point where it will really impact the commercial landscape, before it really impacts what people feel comfortable doing in laboratories – whether it is research laboratories or commercial laboratories – it needs to .. It’s already been appealed to the federal circuit, which is the federal appeals court that hears patent cases. And it’s quite possible that from there it will go to the Supreme Court, and we’re talking at least another year. Perhaps two. Maybe even three more years before we get a final resolution in this case. The reason I think it garnered so much attention is because it really struck a nerve – and going back to this idea of law not always keeping up with where science is – it really struck a nerve when people heard that there were companies out there that held patents on human genes. And we are talking about isolated human genes, genes outside the body, no one owns you, but it is the case that some companies have patents on genes, and they have the ability if they want – and Myriad has done this because of the way patents work – they grant the patent holders monopoly rights, they have the ability to keep other people from doing tests to analyze those genes, to sequence those genes, to ask what does this mean, in the case of BRCA, for the susceptibility of a woman’s or a man’s, risk of getting breast cancer. And I think that struck a nerve with a lot of people.

It’s not the only sort of development with this area… [Other reports] have gone to the Secretary of Health and Human Services that looked at these issues and looked at the gene patent landscape and said this is a problem, this is impeding our ability to do the type of diagnostic or clinical work that we need to do, to advance the state of science and technology. There is another supreme court case that will likely come out on Monday, that also may be significant as far as the extent of biotech patents, in terms of how far they can reach. And it all goes back to this question of trying to strike the right balance. In the case of patents, we’re trying to strike the right balance of information disclosure and getting these technologies out there and allowing people to benefit from them, and preserving the commercial incentive to investments. That is how our legal system works, we build up this body of law over years and decades – in this case, patenting of human genes which reaches back to a 1980s Supreme Court case, probably even further, and it built up incrementally. And science does not work that way, it moves much faster. It was only 10 years ago that we published the first draft of the human genome sequence, and now, 10 years later, we are routinely sequencing whole genomes, let alone individual genes. And so, again, it’s that pace of technological innovation and scientific advancement that is much faster than we have the ability to move in the legal realm. So that causes a conflict in cases like Myriad where now everyone has to sit down and ask, do we have the right balance here? Should genes be patentable? Is this where we want to be? I think there is plenty of debate about that. It may be something that litigation solves, or maybe Congress steps in, or maybe there are people out there working on industry private solutions to work things out without having to wait on the courts to solve it.

One thing that confused me about this, is the idea of patenting human genes. In the case of Myriad, one of the things I was wondering was why do they have to patent a human gene? Why can’t they just patent their test? That seems like a more level playing field.
You’re right, that would be a more level playing field, and I think the simple answer is that if you are going to invest a lot of money into developing a test and researching an association between a gene a certain disease, and then figuring out the corresponding test, you may not want a level playing field. You may want to do all the testing, and that is what Myriad does. I should mention, there are other companies out there that have patents on human genes, and they have a patent that allows them to have exclusive rights to practice that patent. So, to conduct a test, or even to examine the gene, if the patent is one the gene itself; but they license out that patent or set of patents. Myriad, for example, I think has several dozen patents with almost two hundred claims, so we’re not talking about one or two patents, they have a whole suite of patents, that protects this business they’ve built around diagnostic testing for breast cancer, but there are other companies out there that have similar patents that do license them out to other people, and they say, here you can use this technology, you can use this gene that we’ve patented, there is going to be some sort of commercial terms with that, you’ll pay us some sort of royalty, or some kind of fee based on tests that you do, but you can get in the game too and essentially provide the same sort of service that we are providing.

Or, Myriad is a good example. They did not actually patent this themselves, they licensed this from the University of Utah. And so it is interesting because one of the reasons why Myriad was swept up in this litigation is because there are thousands of genes that are patented, Myriad only has patents on a handful, but the reason they became a target in this litigation is partly due t otheir practice of not licensing out their IP, their intellectual property, and not giving people a chance to conduct or to develop competing gene tests. But that is the prerogative of a patent-holder. You have the right to exclude everybody else from practicing your patented invention. You can wave that right, in the form of a license, out to other people, if you want, but you don’t have to. So that is why there is this big question over what should be patentable. The technical discussion centers around section 101 of the Patent Act which defines what is patentable subject matter. And the question is, are genes patentable subject matter, or are they what is considered to be a product of nature?

Is it that things in the natural world can’t be patented?
Well, it doesn’t specifically say that in the Patent Act, but that is the way it has developed in the case law over time. The 1980 case that I referred to earlier … said that what is patentable is anything under the sun made by man. And there is this products of nature doctrine, and it says, well the Supreme Court says, that something that is a product of nature can’t be patented. And then the question is, what is a product of nature? And Myriad argues, in this case, that this is not a product of nature because you are taking genes, which occur naturally in the body, and you are separating them out, you are isolating them, you are doing things to them technically that make them no longer products of nature. And in the technical sense, that is correct because genes do not naturally occur in laboratories. But what Judge Sweet ruled is that what is fundamentally important in these genes, what really makes them significant, is the information that they carry. And that is the same whether you are talking about a BRCA gene in your body, in my body, or in Myriad’s laboratory. The information content is the same, and that is what is significant, so they are products of nature and they can not be patented. Whether that ruling stands up, remains to be seen. There is quite a good chance that it won’t.

That’s an interesting interpretation.
And it’s one that people share. I think it resonates quite strongly with people at a gut level. But again, there are limits to how that can be implemented by law in courts. Congress of course has the ability to change the law. As has happened in many, many cases, if Congress does not like a law they have the ability to go out and change the law.

The Food and Drug Administration is constricting regulations for direct-to-consumer genetic testing services offered by companies that scan a person’s genome and offer analysis for health risks or ancestry. What are the FDA’s specific concerns?
It’s interesting… since the whole Walgreens-Pathways thing blew up about five or six weeks ago now, they went after five or six companies. They’ve taken a step back and said, you know, we think we need to regulate all genetic testing. It’s important to remember that most genetic testing is not what is known as DTC [direct to consumer] or commercial or consumer genetic testing. Most of it occurs in a clinical context, done in clinical laboratories, and that is the vast majority of genetic testing on the market right now. Now, the concerns they raise about taking a risk-based approach to regulation, and specifically they are concerned about the safety and efficacy of these tests. So, making sure that the tests are accurate, making sure that – accurate in the sense that when you test for X, you actually get X – that’s what’s called analytical validity.

And then also what is known as clinical validity, which is making sure that the association or the link reported by the tests so that if you do have X, that means you have an increased risk of getting breast cancer, is actually a valid one. And in an area of science that is so new and so changing, that is something that can be difficult to show. Or it may be controversial. So there is a lot of recorded genetic associations that require confirmation, maybe they need more traditional studies to confirm the results, and some studies that have disproved associations, so that is a concern too.

Then there is a third problem which is what is known as clinical utility which is that even if you measure the association correctly and it does mean what you say it does, so you have X, you’ve actually measured X accurately and it does mean that you have an increased risk of disease Y, then clinical utility asks, Can I do anything with this? Can I take this to my doctor and can he start me on a new medication, or tell me that if I lose 15 pounds, then I can prevent myself from developing condition Y. That’s the clinical utility prong, and there is a lot of disagreement there about whether that is something the FDA should really be concerned with, or if that is something that should be left up to individuals. And there are varying definitions as to what constituted clinical utility. Alzheimers is a good example. There aren’t many drugs on the market right now that can be used to reverse the effects of Alzheimers, or be used as a preventative measure for preventing Alzhiemers.

But there are a lot of lifestyle changes that have some evidence that they might help. And there are lot of people that argue that for me, clinical utility means just knowing. If I want to know, then I should be able to know because then I can engage in family planning. I might decide to take an earlier retirement. I might do other things differently. There is going to be a big public meeting July 19 and 20 in DC where I will be at the FDA to talk about some of these issue and give them feedback as they start writing regulations. And of course, in addition to the FDA, the House of Representatives, Congressman Waxman’s committee, have gotten involved with writing letters and they appear to be gearing up to hold hearings and maybe do something in this area. I heard recently that Senator Hatch has a bill out that would address genetic tests and specifically create a new division within the FDA to address those. There is another bill on the House side, I think,… that would also wade into this area. So there are a number of different pathways on the table right now for how the regulation of genetic tests may develop. It’s a bit of a scramble right now.

Even though you said that direct-to consumer genomic tests are a small slice of the genomic testing pie, what legal concerns do consumers need to be aware of when using personal genomic testing?
Well, it is a small… let me back up by saying that consumer genetic testing is a small slice of the overall genetic testing pie, but diagnostics — and that includes an increasingly large percentage of what we think about when we talk about personalized health care – and there are some people that believe that within the not-to-distant future, it’s going to be diagnostics riving therapeutics, so drugs and pharmaceuticals, and not the other way around. Right now, you’ve got these big diagnostic companies, and you’ve got big pharmaceutical companies, but that may flip. We are really looking at, I think, a shift coming down the road. There are some questions associated with consumer tests. A lot of the issues are similar to just the issues associated with learning about genetic information in any context. You want to know that you understand… what information you will find out, if it will be useful to you.

There have always been concerns about somebody else getting ahold of that information and somebody else using that against you. That’s one reason we passed the information non-discrimination act in 2008, to prevent employers and health insurers from using that information. But, that doesn’t mean that other people can not potentially get access to that information and use it against you. That could be your friends, or your co-workers or your family workers.

One thing you hear happening is non-paternity as a result of genetic testing, so you go get tested and your father gets tested and you find out, wait a second, our DNA doesn’t match. I think it’s something like a 10 percent non-paternity rate in this country, which is pretty high compared to what the known rate of non-paternity is. So there is a lot of those cases out there that I think are probably unknown to the family. So you can find out information that might be upsetting to you, or that might be surprising to you. You can also find out information that might be very useful, or interesting to you. That is a balance that everybody needs to sort of strike for themselves and think carefully about. So there are privacy concerns, discrimination concerns. The accuracy of the information… you have to be prepared that it’s not always accurate. There is clinical genetic testing and consumer genetic testing.

Have you tested your genome?
I have. I’ve had myself genotyped by 23AndMe, which is one of the companies that is in the middle of all this. Probably one of the most prominent companies. I paid for it myself. I did not want a conflict of interest because they have gien away a number of reduced cost or low-cost kits and I did not want to have any conflict there. And I think that is all I’ll say about that, because I’m going to be talking publicly about that in the not-too-distant future.

A concentrated photovoltaic "solar tree" designed by MegaWatt Solar. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

I recently wrote a two-part post here reporting on a forum in Research Triangle Park which focused on barriers to homegrown global business innovation in the Triangle and in North Carolina. While contemplating the themes of the forum, and skimming today’s science news, I stumbled across this article in  Popular Mechanics magazine which looks into the advances in concentrated photovoltaics over the past few years — and leads with the example of MegaWatt Solar, a renewable energy start-up in our own backyard. The company was formed by three professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who seek to create utility-scaled concentrated photovoltaic systems to supplement fossil fuels-based energy production. (They’ve also been featured in UNC’s Endeavors research magazine, and have landed a story or two in the News & Observer, no longer available in their web archives.)

It struck me that MegaWatt Solar is a good example of the applied research that our area universities can generate to solve real-world problems, and also of the links that can be established between professors with marketable ideas and business-savvy entrepreneurs that can help carry the ideas from the research bench to the bank. Their story is truly one of homegrown innovation, though to be fair they are still in the pilot study phase and working out some kinks.

Because I’ve already written this story, I’m not going to write it again… Below is a reprint of the cover story article I penned about the people behind MegaWatt Solar, and their mission, for the fall 2009 issue of UNC College of Arts & Sciences magazine. It is reprinted here with full permission from the editors.

UNC Arts & Science cover, fall 2009, with MegaWatt Solar founders.

The Power of 20 Suns

MegaWatt Solar is a small start-up energy company in Hillsborough, N.C., backed by $17 million from Norwegian venture capitalists and mentally powered by three researchers in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Tucked away in a brick textile-mill-turned-office-park, the company is poised to bring a new concentrated photovoltaic system to market that could provide the cheapest large-scale renewable source of electricity available anywhere.

But they didn’t design it for your home. They designed it for your utility company, to offset peak energy demand, which tends to coincide with the sunniest portions of the solar day. The term MegaWatt describes their goal of producing one megawatt of electricity from over a thousand solar “trees” spread across about 10 acres. The solar trees rotate on a dual axis mount that tracks the sun across the sky vault. One megawatt of electricity — one million watts — is enough to power about 800 homes.

MegaWatt Solar was founded by astrophysicist Chris Clemens, theoretical physicist Charles Evans, computer scientist Russ Taylor and a private sector power-grid systems engineer, Dan Gregory. They built their alpha version in spring 2006 in Evans’ driveway from what he describes as “an aluminum erector set for adults,” with parts bought off E-Bay, cheap advertising signboard and a highly reflective material scavenged from the interior of a Solotube skylight.

The best part? It worked.

“Boy, it was bright, “Evans said. “Everyone ran to get their sunglasses.”

They measured its electrical output and knew they were on to something red hot. The alpha reflector had a concentrating factor of 24:1. However, the team reduced this to 20:1 in their final design, to balance limitations from excessive heat buildup with low-cost solutions. Still, the power of 20 suns is impressive.

Since that weekend science project, the researchers have ruthlessly honed their design in an iterative process. They are on their fourth version, which uses four trough-shaped mirrors to produce about 0.75 kilowatts, and Clemens thinks they are nearing the finish line. He believes they will have a marketable product within a year that produces 1 kilowatt. A power utility would need to install about 1,000 of the concentrated solar trees, which Taylor estimates would take about 10 acres, to produce one megawatt. From the get-go, the trio wanted the design to be as low-cost as possible.

Rows of photovoltaic cells engineered to receive 20 times the concentration of normal sunlight. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

They have one pilot project in Caswell County, where Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation has installed sixteen 12-mirror solar trees. The team is retro-fitting the units to address wind demands, but they expect the new solar plant to be online by December, when they will begin field-testing them. A second pilot project is planned in Florida. They are also field testing six units that are located a stone’s throw from their Hillsborough office. MegaWatt’s solar trees are modular in design, to allow for periodic upgrades in a fast-paced technological world. Clemens, whose background is in astronomical instrumentation, designed the rough concept for the unit, and Evans focused on perfecting the light collecting and concentrating system.

“One of our mantras was that because the mirrors are the component that would cover a lot of ground, they had to pretty much be cheaper than dirt,” Evans said. They settled on an inexpensive exterior signboard material called Dibond, topped with a 3M film. Clemens jokes that it is the “cheapest mirror known to man,” but its 94 percent reflectivity and extremely light-weight aluminum frame are no joke. Taylor and his team worked on the computing that drives the dual-axis mechanical and optical tracking system. His team designed software that learns and anticipates where the reflectors need to be, and directs them there. This software allows the units to be installed anywhere on earth, he said, and within three days the unit will learn all it needs to know to track the sun and keep the reflectors in the right place.

Clemens and Evans extensively researched other concentrated photovoltaic projects and picked the best elements from them. A central key to their process was using existing technologies and materials, which kept costs down. MegaWatt Solar does not plan to mass produce the solar trees. Rather, they plan to work directly with interested utilities, license the design to large engineering firms, and advise local contractors on the construction and parts-purchasing.

They’re not the first to propose concentrating light to make more efficient use of photovoltaic cells. But they may be the first to do it cheaply, reliably and at a utility scale.

While it would be impossible to separate the global from the state-level issues discussed at the forum, some of the local business people offered examples for specific challenges to innovation that they faced.

Alexander Macris is the president of Themis Group which is based in Durham, N.C. and is a strong example of the power of a science park like RTP to attract additional tech-based businesses to the region. Macris said that the Triangle region is one of the largest concentrations of gaming companies in the U.S. Most of the innovation potential in gaming is at the gaming engine and software level, he said, and the average median income of someone in the gaming industry is about $75,000. He expects to see about 300 to 400 new gaming-related jobs in the area over the next three to five years, he said, because the industry is growing in the double digits. But at the same time, the cost of game development is going up – whereas a decade ago it may have cost $1 million to develop a game, it costs $20 to $30 million to do so today, Macris said. Foreign countries give more tax credits to their gaming companies, he said, which makes them more competitive in the global field and is hurting U.S.-based gaming companies. “Targeted tax credits are a huge attractant to small and start-up businesses in the gaming industry,” Macris said. “And cool downtowns, the creative class really likes a vibrant downtown too.”

While deeper tax credits may help some start-ups get a toe-hold in emerging markets, retaining the best talent is necessary to sustain them over time. And while uber cool downtowns like the American Tobacco District in Durham are one component of enticements to retain the best brains, it’s a smaller part of the issue. Jennie Hunter-Cevera of RTI said that 50 percent of foreign students who earn a doctorate in the U.S. end up exporting their knowledge by returning to their home countries. “We have a brain drain going on, and we need to make it easier and more attractive for the brightest to stay,” she said. (What do you think will help retain top-graduating foreign students in the U.S.? Leave a comment.)

Tim Toben, who chairs the NC Energy Policy Council, said that certain existing state policies were attempting to tap emerging markets by requiring utility companies to use renewable energy for 12.5 percent of their energy mix by 2021. While critics say the target is too low, Toben said that N.C. has a record of being one of the most progressive southeastern states when it comes to energy and the environment. “The utilities know we are moving into a carbon-constrained future,” Toben said, citing a Duke Energy plan to drop their reliance on coal from 42 percent today t 32 percent in 2030, or even as low as 17 percent. “For entrepreneurs, what resources will replace this ? Wind? Nuclear? Biomass? There’s a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs in a carbon-limited future and we want N.C. to be the leader in the Southeast in the new green economy.” (Which begs the question: What specifically is the state energy office doing to help start-ups like MegaWatt Solar or BioRxn?  I have not looked into this at all, so if you have any insight then please leave a comment down below.)

But even if the policies, foreign visas and the vision of local leaders and educators all align into the perfect climate for innovative business, what sort of characteristics do innovative businesses and visionary business leaders typically have? Clay Thorpe, a partner of Hatteras Venture Partners, shared a list of just such traits he amassed from talking to high-level personnel in Genentech. “I’ve been asked why N.C. has not had a homegrown success, a globally-innovative business develop here,” Thorp said. “And I’ve thought about this a lot. We’re the number three biotech hub in the country, and we’re good at attracting existing businesses to the area.” Thorp said he had an opportunity to meet with leaders from Genentech, widely considered one of the main founding companies of the biotech industry, and he asked them what they thought contributed to their success.

“You have to have a driver, like Bob Swanson at Genentech, who set the cultural tone.” Thorp said. “I hesitate to say it, but it’s almost 5 to 10 percent the quality of the technology and 90 to 95 percent the driver.” In addition to having a visionary and energizing leader, Genentech spent an inordinate amount of time hiring good people, he said. They would court people they wanted to attract, sometimes for years, and chose very carefully. The leaders also fostered an ethic of loyalty and hardwork, which resulted in dedicated employees “going the extra mile” when it was needed. The company was also built upon a foundation of “patient, long-standing capital,” Thorp said, which gave them the stability and time to do proper research. In addition, Genentech required its scientists to publish scientific papers on their research and they held them to such high academic standards that often Genentech papers were cited over papers by ivey-league academic researchers.

While there were no clear answers presented at the Global Innovation Forum on Friday, a lot of conservation was generated. We want to hear from you — what are your thoughts on state or federal policies, or cultural shifts, that will help carve a climate favorable to business innovation with global trade potential? Let us know in the comments section below.

“We’re here today to learn from you so that we can go back to Washington and do what we do,” said NFTC president Bill Reinsch in his opening remarks. “We want to build relationships with companies and open a conversation with them to develop stronger links.” Reinsch said that his group was traveling to technology-innovation clusters like RTP and Silicon Valley to find out first-hand from companies what sort of policies were encumbering them from doing business globally, which were helping, and what sort of ideas they had for the future.

How to create and sustain jobs and businesses is a question that both federal and local governments have wrestled with sharply and frequently since the economic downturn. Research Triangle Park, NC has long been a technology-hub and economic engine for the state, noted RTP CEO Rick Weddle, and the area has excelled in life sciences, information technology, and biotech markets, but capturing emerging markets like gaming and clean energy technologies will be vital to RTP maintaining its vitality in the future. But how can science parks like RTP, and the states they’re rooted in, cultivate homegrown small businesses (and they jobs and economic resilience they generate) in emerging and established markets, especially when the banks are slow to lend — if they lend at all — and cash is plain hard to come by?

NC State Treasurer Janet Cowell presented one state-level contribution to the problem: a still-forming program called the Innovation Fund that will invest $230 million in N.C. businesses over the next three to five years from the state’s $67 billion pension fund. “Our pension fund is bigger than General Motors,” Cowell said. “Other states have used this approach for distressed parts of their states, but we’re applying this method with a market-based approach which makes me confident we can expect a return on our investment.” In other words, the state may be coughing up cash from the pension fund in the short-term, but they expect the money to generate more cash over time. The state plans to allocate about 10 to 25 percent of the $230 million as venture capital, 5 to 15 percent will be growth equity, 40 to 60 percent will be used for buyouts, and 5 to 35 percent for special situations. They will sprinkle their investments across established and emerging market sectors including: agriculture, life sciences, clean technology, green technology and renewable energy. The Innovation Fund is managed by Credit Suisse which has 1,050 employees in N.C. out of 47,000 global employees, and Cowell said the state chose them because of their performance record managing similar funds. (For more information, visit www.ncinnovationfund.com.)

But cash is only one prong of the multi-pronged solution to stimulating local scientific and business innovations with global potential. Access to a well-educated and prepared talent pool is a second prong; policies inducive to global trade are a third. These aspects were hashed out at length by two panels focused on the role of state and federal policies.

Sandy Merber, a specialist in international trade regulation and sourcing for General Electric, cited a study that found 84 percent of U.S. businesses said they’d lost business opportunities with China in 2008 because of visa problems in getting their Chinese business partners to the U.S. “It took me one day to get an emergency business visa to get into China, while the average is four days,” Merber said. “Guess what the average is for a Chinese businessman to come here? 31 days. That holds up deals, and that’s got to be expedited.”

Jennie Hunter-Cervera, executive vice-president of RTI, shared that a big challenge her company faces is the labyrinthine international laws that businesses must navigate to get business licenses to work in other countries. RTI works in 40 countries and holds 40 different business licenses in these countries, but she said the process of obtaining a license often slows down the companies ability to grow. She also noted that collaboration is difficult in some foreign countries because they don’t honor the same gene patent laws. RTI wants to take its research “from the bench to the bank” she said, meaning that the group seeks a return on dollars sunk into basic research and development. But it’s far easier to get government-funded grants for basic research than for research demonstrating proof of concept – data that may be necessary to convince a bank or venture capital group to invest in translating a project into a marketable product. “Proof of concept grants are not well-represented in the federal grants mix,” she said.

Heather Osborne Clark, director of trade and policy for Merck & Co., said that her company earns 50 percent of its income outside the U.S. in about 140 different emerging markets, and she reiterated that streamlining foreign visa processes would be helpful to Merck’s growth. She also noted that the resources allotted to foreign government agencies tied to trade and commerce are proportionally larger (in comparison to gross domestic product) than what the US allots to our agencies. “We need to better fund our agencies so that we can be more competitive,” she said.

Most of the business people attending seemed to agree that one area they would like to see the federal government help them abroad was in protecting intellectual property rights in foreign countries. While their rights were well-protected in the U.S., they noted serious infringements could occur in other countries with little in the way of laws or hegemony to help them.

… Part II of this post explores NC-centric issues discussed at the Global Innovation Forum, such as green energy markets, gaming, and characteristics of a globally-innovative business.

Panelists at the NAE Grand Challenges Summit, Innovation in America. Left to right, Lynn Soby, vice president of innovation and commercialization at RTI International; John Chambers, CEO of CISCO; Jeff Wadsworth, CEO of Battelle Memorial Institute; and Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware). Photo by Roger Winstead/NCSU.

RALEIGH — You may be familiar with the idea that American businesses – especially those tied to technology and engineering – fret that our country is losing its innovative edge on the global stage. And because innovation drives technological advancement and economic growth – one might even say, hegemony – it’s a looming threat that many in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are scrambling to address.

But STEM fields are facing a crisis of their own – fewer graduates in the jobs pipeline compared to industry demands, and companies hiring foreigners for STEM jobs because they are better qualified.

Friday morning in Raleigh, a group of engineers from industry, academia and even government met to discuss the threat of America losing its global lead in innovation. The panel discussion was part of a Summit on the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges sponsored by N.C. State and Duke universities. (To learn more about the NAE Grand Challenges, go here.) Titled “American Innovation and Competitiveness,” the panel was chaired by Lynn Soby, vice president of innovation and commercialization at RTI International in Research Triangle Park. It was one of seven sessions spanning March 4-5.

Three panelists representing public and private industry and government emphasized that the problem could not be fully addressed unless the nation’s secondary education system is revolutionized.

Jeff Wadsworth, CEO and president of Battelle Memorial Institute, noted that high school graduation rates have fallen from about 86 percent in the Baby Boomer generation to about 72 percent today. He compared that to a 96 percent graduation rate in Denmark, 92 percent in Japan and the fact that China graduates three engineering students for every one that we do.  It’s not news that international competition is stiffening against us, but the statistics he presented about how the U.S. measures up to foreign countries in K-12 metrics was gut-wrenching.

“Our historic lead in secondary education has disappeared,” Wadsworth said. “And as a leader of a large organization, I worry about education.”

Wadsworth is not alone in this worry. Members of the Business Round Table have also expressed concern about what the future holds for the U.S. with a shrinking STEM pipeline feeding a growing global demand.

Another panelist, Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) said the country was at a critical point in history. “We are in an economic war,” he said. “The future of our country rests on our ability to use STEM to solve problems.” Kauffman is the only sitting senator in Congress to have worked in the engineering field, and he repeatedly drummed out a message that policy could drive a solution to the STEM crisis.

Panelists at the American Innovation and Competitveness session. Photo by Roger Winstead/NCSU.

Taking a different tact, Wadsworth emphasized increasing financial incentives to teachers and working to change societal and cultural mores such that STEM education fields and STEM jobs are viewed as more prestigious and more desirable. A third panelist — John Chambers, chairman and CEO of CISCO – said he believed changing teaching methods in K-12 settings to be more collaborative, projects-oriented and skills-mastery oriented would be a good starting point.

Both Chambers and Wadsworth discussed the importance of developing new metrics for measuring not only student potential and performance, but teacher’s efficiencies. “We don’t need to know a student’s class rank,” Wadsworth said. “We need to know their vector.”

Chambers also explored the idea of using gaming and collaborative teaching methods because he said that as an employer, he is interested in hiring people who have collaborative work skills and who can learn and develop in collaborative work situations.

Perhaps with this emphasis on K-12 education as the pivotal platform business is eyeing as a solution to the STEM crisis, it was no accident that the deans of the engineering colleges at both Duke and NC State universities announced today a new nationwide program targeting attracting school-aged children to the STEM fields. The Grand Challenge K-12 Partners Program will lean on engineering colleges throughout the U.S. to be resource hubs for K-12 students and teachers in their region.

It was clear that the panelists were grappling with the conundrum of how to tap future generations of students to step-up their game and embrace devoting themselves to an education and a career path in science, math, technology or engineering.

Wadsworth hammered home the point that despite the grimness of the STEM crisis, “Now is a good time to be an engineer,” because there are so many problems awaiting solutions. In his view, a large part of the path to economic recovery lies in transforming our current economic platform to the energy revolution. “There are so many opportunities if you want to solve energy problems,” he said. He discussed his perspective that the future of economic growth and even political stability was rooted in innovation in green technologies which would create green jobs rooted in a sustainable path.

“China gets it,” Wadsworth said. “Last year they became the biggest producer of wind turbines. They were all ready the biggest producer of solar panels.”

What is it going to take for the U.S. to lead and dominate not only the globally-emerging green markets, but the innovation that will drive these markets? A political solution? An educational revolution? A re-structuring of our society’s values? Each panelist seemed to have a slightly different vision. Elements of all appear to be primary ingredients in the formula for change.

What do you think solutions may be? Is your company, school or organization doing something to address the STEM crisis? Please share your thoughts and stories in the comments section.

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ONLIEN EXTRAS:
Three more NAE Grand Challenge Summits are scheduled to take place next month, in Phoenix, Chicago and Boston. A fourth is scheduled for Seattle in May.

N.C. State University College of Engineering

Duke University Pratt School of Engineering

Want to know more about the speakers? Click here for bios.

Female northern cardinal, N.C.'s state bird, and the most-reported bird for the Great Backyard Bird Count, a citizen science project. (Wikki Commons image)

The Great Backyard Bird Count is perhaps one of North America’s most popular citizen science projects. It’s been on-going since 1998, and uses the power of citizen’s eyes and interest to create a snapshot of what kinds of birds are where, and in what abundance, in mid-February.

The 2010 four-day count wrapped up last week on Feb. 15th with citizens across the nation reporting 90,898 checklists tallying 10,587,907 individual birds representing 597 species.* The most frequently reported bird was our state bird, the Northern Cardinal. North Carolinian’s sent in 4,722 checklists, resulting in our state ranking third among total number of checklists submitted. (Mine was among them.) Visit this map of N.C. state results to see species tallies for what your fellow citizens reported.

But one thing the checklists did not capture was a rare winter migrant wandering south through The Triangle. Rick Bonney, director of program development and evaluation at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology visited Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park on Tuesday and imparted hard-won words of advice to the Science Communicators of North Carolina about developing citizen science projects, like the Great Backyard Bird Count, garnered across his more than two decades of experience at Cornell. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology collaborates with the Audubon Society** and Bird Studies Canada on the GBBC, but they also have many of their own citizen science projects, and as Bonney described, a very long history of engaging citizens in science that traces all the way back to the lab’s founder, Arthur Allen.

Citizen science, by definition, generally involves using a network of non-scientist citizens to gather and report data used for scientific analysis. Less often, it involves citizens participating in the data analysis itself. One of the criticisms of using citizen scientists centers on the reliability of the data gathered. Bonney said that with proper pilot testing, training of volunteers and project design, reliability of the data can be ensured. Though Bonney did not delve into the mechanisms ensuring the rigor and integrity of data gathered by citizen scientists, he did allude to the fact that about 15 staff at the Cornell Lab have spent more than two decades and $15 million dollars “getting it right.”

For the most part, data from the three top citizen science projects at the lab — the GBBC, eBird and Project FeederWatch — are used to make maps that visualize where species are found, how many are there, at what time of year, and across time as well as answer questions about bird behavior and ecology. Maps can be compared across time to examine, for example, the red-bellied woodpecker’s northern range expansion in the past few years (thanks to climate change). Or the meandering seasonal distribution of common redpolls based upon food availability. Maps can be used to help target conservation areas for sensitive species, and trace how species use habitat. Unfortunately, the maps include an inherent reporting bias: species are routinely under-reported in areas of sparse human settlement. Other projects, like CamClickr, allow observers to sort and categorize millions of images snapped from “nest cams” inside nest cavities and nest boxes, giving the participant an insider’s view to the life of wild birds while also giving scientists a leg-up on classifying their data.

“To my knowledge, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the only major science institution with a commitment to citizen science in its mission statement,” Bonney said. (Anyone care to fact-check this? Feel free to leave your findings in our comment section.)

Bonney said he has a success rate “approaching 70 percent” for garnering National Science Foundation funding for citizen science projects, and he stated he’s had 18 NSF proposals funded to the tune of about $20 million over the past two decades. Aside from trying to answer specific scientific questions, he said the lab’s goal with citizen science projects is to: 1.) increase scientific knowledge; 2.) gather meaningful data that answers large-scale questions; 3.) increase conservation action; and 4.) get people to think critically and evaluate evidence.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology features 11 citizen science projects on their website. Check them out.

Have you participated in a citizen science project? Tell us about it in the comments section.

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* Numbers are not final, since citizens have until March 1 to report their sightings.
** One of the longest running citizen science projects in the nation is the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, which has been active for 110 years.

Dr. James Hansen

Just as the snow was beginning to melt after one of the worst winter storms to hit the Triangle in recent memory passed, climate scientist James Hansen visited the Univ. of N.C. at Chapel Hill to talk about – you guessed it – global warming.

It’s probably not the first time he’s delivered a speech during wacky weather, and it likely won’t be the last.

Hansen directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and he is an adjunct professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. His visit to the Triangle was courtesy of UNC’s Frey Foundation distinguished visiting professor lecture series. Before his Monday evening lecture, Hansen met with UNC students studying climate change policy in a course taught by environmental policy professor Richard Andrews. Today, he will speak to an undergraduate class studying rivers and global change, taught by Brent McKee, professor and chair of marine sciences.

Hansen has become the public face of climate change science and policy. His outspoken criticism of political solutions to limiting greenhouse gas emissions, such as cap-and-trade systems, has earned him as many friends as it has foes. In recent years, he has moved from the realm of science into advocacy, with no apologies. Perhaps most famously he was arrested on June 23, 2009 along with 31 other protesters “on charges of obstructing officers and impeding traffic during a protest against mountaintop mining,” according to reporter Andy Revkin’s blog Dot Earth. The West Virginia protest lives on at YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But his tone on Monday night was subdued. Even understated. He said the reason he has chosen to speak out so loudly is because he wants his grandkids to know that given all he understands about climate change, he tried to help the public understand too. He wants them to know he gave it his best.

The core of his public talk focused on the now-familiar mechanics of what scientists know about climate change and how they know it. He discussed how paleo-climatology informs scientists studying modern global trends and those building models that predict future trends. He talked about longterm trends on land and in the deep sea, and how interplanetary forces affect earth’s oscillations and exposure to the sun’s light.

“There is a gap between what scientists understand, and what the public knows,” Hansen said. Personally, I’d flip that around to: there is a gap between what scientists know, and what the public understands (or think they know).

Looking to the past, he described a time 50 million years ago when the earth was ice free, and there was about 1,000 parts per million of carbon dioxode (CO2) in the atmosphere. Our current levels are at about 350 ppm, dangerously near a tipping point, he said. He discussed how India colliding with Asia churned up carbonate from the seafloor, causing a massive natural forcing of climate change. But even this major event pales in comparison with what is in the pipeline, he says. It only caused a change of about .0001 ppm of atmospheric CO2, whereas anthropogenic sources today are causing an increase of about 2 ppm per year.

In graph after graph, he showed upward trending greenhouse gases and temperatures. The only downward trending graph was that of the loss of mass in large ice sheets like Greenland and Antarctica.

“To preserve creation on this planet, similar to what civilization developed in,” humanity will need to target CO2 reductions less than 350 ppm, he said. Reaching that target is a matter of great political debate and divisiveness. Hansen disfavors cap-and-trade systems and instead advocates for fee-dividend systems, which he says are  “designed to benefit the public rather than Wall Street.” Under this system, fossil fuel companies would pay a carbon fee on the first sale of oil, gas and coal at the mine, wellhead or port of entry. This fee would be divvied up to the public monthly, deposited electronically in people’s bank accounts.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for this to materialize in legislature though; even Hansen admits the current political system is entrenched in trying to move cap-and-trade systems forward, although some say they likely won’t do much to decrease net greenhouse gas emissions.

The bottom line is that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy their use will continue and even increase, Hansen said. So he advocates for a fundamental revamping of our energy sources away from carbon-based fuels, of which coal is the dirtiest. Which circles back to why this understated, eloquent and extremely smart man ended up in handcuffs last summer due to civil unrest: he was protesting mountain-top-removal mining which removes entire mountain tops to get to coal beds. Massey Energy is one the largest companies engaged in this practice, and he and other protesters were attempting to enter their property in West Virginia.

Hansen is one of the few scientists willing to step so deliberately in to the public sphere, and on Monday night he drove home his conviction that the only solution to climate change is a political one driven by policy.

“We don’t have a political leader who will stand up and say, ‘This is an injustice,’” Hansen said.

As for the recent foul weather? Hansen says it is the result of an extreme phase of “Arctic oscillation,” the result of the jet stream that typically keeps Arctic air locked down around the poles weakening, allowing frigid air to leak out and be replaced by warmer air.

“The Arctic has been warmer than normal, while it was colder than normal here,” he said. “Don’t look for this to happen again soon – it’s been three decades since we’ve seen a phase as extreme as this one.”

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ONLINE EXTRAS:
Full audio and power point slides available here.
James Hansen on David Letterman:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ed Yong, who writes Not Exactly Rocket Science, a blog that has made an international splash, talked about the future of science journalism as a blending of old and new: retaining the best skills from the specialized training journalists receive and blending it with new mediums like blogging. He also compared the shifting landscape to that of filling a new set of niches in an ecosystem that had just undergone a significant disturbance, you can read his eloquent explanation here. I have to point out though that he talked about the role of science journalism in society, but less so the preservation of that one keystone endangered species: the science journalisT. What role does this rare breed have in a landscape where generalists and hobbyists are attempting to fill the vaccuum left by fewer and fewer professional science journalists? Yong has a day job that pays his bills, his blog is something he does on his own time (and I like his blog, it’s good and worth visiting). So as successful as his exposure is, it does not fully answer the question for me as to how science journalisTS  will be preserved in the future. Will they become hobbyists who have day jobs that pay the bills and the health insurance and cushion the retirement account?

David Dobbs, a professional science journalist (and blogger at Neuron Culture) touched on this idea. He talked about the difference in his longform feature writing style, and the types of stories he writes. There are the “wow, this is cool” science stories, or the “this is an interesting take on an old idea” stories (think: something new under the sun); then there are the “something smells funny stories” (think: investigative); then there are what he called the “larger seismic level interplay between science and culture stories” (think: science in society). All of these require time and lots of money to produce. (Ah, I thought, now we’re getting to the meat of the problem.) Dobbs has been in the business long enough to be able to talk about the divorce between a writer’s payment for services and the venue where they are publishing. He said they used to be one and the same (think: big glossy magazines with big glo$$y paycheck$) but now the emerging trend is for foundations to pay for the production of a good story, and the publication platform to be elsewhere. For example, Spot.us recently helped raise funds for Lindsey Hoshaw to write a story about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that ran in the New York Times. This was a bit more satisfying answer for the budding career science writer, but it’s unclear whether this trend is an emergency “fill the gap” measure or if it is here to stay.

But it was the economics behind Carl Zimmer’s talk that flummoxed me the most. I greatly admire Zimmer’s writing, and the fact he can make a natural history story become a whizbang mainstream story that people want to read. But he recounted an anecdote in which he had a really cool, totally whizbang story idea, and his editor said “no thanks.” Now, Zimmer is a staff writer, so I’m guessing it’s not as big of a deal if his editor says no… whereas if I receive a “no thanks,” that also means “no paycheck” and that is a significant problem for my bank account. {NOTE: Please see comments below. Correction: Zimmer is not a staff writer, and is freelance with the New York Times.) So I thought he was going to talk about shopping the story around… but instead he talked about using video the researcher sent him, embedding it in his personal blog, and watching it go viral on the web because it was all about duck sex. (Like I said, whizbang, baby!) Funny story, and it spoke to the issue of the multiple modes by which a person can disseminate an interesting science story to the masses and get people exposed to and interested in science… but it did not address the fundamental question of how to make a living from telling and writing science stories.

So I left the session wondering, “whither the science journalisTS”? Rebooting science journalism and envisioning the future, I heard a lot of talk about the different forms science journalism would take, but I was thoroughly let down that there was virtually no discussion of how to preserve — even the necessity to preserve — professional, career science journalisTS. If we are headed to a future filled with hobbyist journalists, then I envision a landmine of issues for both the public receiving this information, and the scientists and the science that become the content and the focus of hobbyist storytellers and reporters. True, there are exceptions. Ed Yong is a great blogger. I read his blog, and I like his blog. But not every one is — or will be — an Ed Yong. And most science journalists, like me, expect that we will be able to do our jobs and, sorry to sound crass, but still be able to afford to eat and maintain our homes and send our kids to college. And that is the question left unanswered. Would love to hear your comments on this evolving conundrum.