Posts Tagged ‘Duke’
R&D billions are tectonic force in Research Triangle area
Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 8:27 pmThe brainpower for which North Carolina’s Research Triangle area is known tends to hide inside buildings, behind tall trees or somewhere on sprawling university campuses.
Crossing Research Triangle Park on Interstate 40 or visiting Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or N.C. State University provides little insight into what fuels one of the hottest U.S. research and development hubs.
Michael Walden
Sure, the Triangle was named the brainiest U.S. region and Raleigh the fastest growing metropolitan area last year. And the area’s vaunted labor pool continues to draw scientists and R&D companies from elsewhere, even though companies have closed shop or laid off employees in the past two years and the unemployment rate in the Triangle is nearly twice as high than before the economic downturn.
Mike Walden, an NCSU economist, doesn’t mince words when he assesses how important R&D is for the RTP area. “It’s one of our basic industries,” Walden said. “It’s one of the things that make us tick.”
But what sustains and boosts this industry that, it can be argued, flavors everything locally from schools to restaurants?
The credit usually goes to the three main research universities, Duke, UNC-CH and NCSU, and the hundreds of companies in and around RTP. But what specifically is it that they do to shape the RTP area? Is it the graduates they produce every year, the discoveries they spin off into local startup companies, or the money they spend on R&D? Read more…
Scientifica Gets Durham School Kids Excited about Science
Monday, August 16, 2010, 7:25 am
Dr. Anu Sud talks to Robby Fisher, a Durham student participating in the Scientifica program she helped found.
Dr. Anu Sud’s two daughters were accomplished in science by the time they were in high school, in part thanks to coaching by their mother, who had been a cytogeneticist at UNC-Chapel Hill and at LabCorps. The older daughter attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, and the younger, Shivani, won a $100,000 scholarship in the Intel Science Talent Search and numerous other top science honors when she was a junior and senior at Jordan High School.
When Shivani went off to Princeton, Dr. Sud was like many professional women who interrupt their careers to raise kids: should she return to her former career or try a new path? Then Shivani said to her, “Mom, why not help other kids like you helped us?” Read more…
Turning brainpower into companies
Monday, August 2, 2010, 7:45 pm
Ted Zoller
North Carolina’s Research Triangle last year scored as the brainiest U.S. region, ahead of San Francisco’s Bay Area, which is home to Silicon Valley. Universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, a research and development hub of world renown and state economic engine, had a lot to do with the winning score.
But brainiest doesn’t mean most entrepreneurial as Ted Zoller, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, found out. Read more…
Duke’s PottiGate: Another scandal
Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 9:41 pm
Paul Goldberg
Dr. Anil Potti, the Duke University cancer researcher whose resume and research are under scrutiny, is the ideal target for Paul Goldberg, the editor of The Cancer Letter. Goldberg, who has an uncanny sense for hubris, is building a reputation for outing bad apples among cancer researchers, and he has dug up some interesting documents about Potti.
I met Goldberg a year ago at a training course the National Institutes of Health put on for science writers. He was one of the speakers and talked about a lung cancer researcher whose research was flawed and who failed to disclose the $3.6 million she had received from a cigarette maker.
After I read The Cancer Letter’s special issue about Potti, I called Goldberg and got his permission to link to the documents supporting the stories. Read more…
RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub
Friday, July 23, 2010, 7:22 pmNorth Carolina’s Research Triangle was bested by California to get federal funding for a solar fuels innovation hub. The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded the $122 million prize to a group led by the California Institute of Technology.
The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.
RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.
“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.
Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:
Lancet investigates claims of shoddy research by Potti, Duke colleagues
Friday, July 23, 2010, 2:25 pmNow, the scandal that’s been brewing at Duke University over a researcher and his research methods has expanded to the Lancet Oncology investigating potential errors in a report the medical journal published in December 2007.
Dr. Anil Potti, a Duke cancer researcher, was suspended last week after his claim to have been a Rhodes scholar could not be confirmed. Duke also halted enrollment in three clinical trials that Potti lead. The trials used gene-based test results of drug sensitivity to predict cancer patients’ responses to chemotherapy drugs.
Potti and colleagues at Duke also did the statistical analysis for a report published in the Lancet Oncology three years ago. The report was based on results from a clinical trial involving breast cancer patients. The published report was titled, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.”
The report, which had 19 co-authors, was an important step toward personalized medicine.
But the Lancet Oncology today expressed concern over errors that two of the report’s authors detected in the statistical analysis by Potti and his Duke colleagues.
Here it is: S0140673610701856
The Lancet investigation goes way beyond potentially false claims of one Duke researcher being a Rhodes scholar. Questions of research methods and errors reach beyond one possibly rogue researcher and potentially put patients’ lives at risk.
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with William Saleu
Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 5:13 pmContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked William Saleu to answer a few questions:
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is William Saleu and I blog at BomaiCruz. I am from Papua New Guinea (PNG), an independent island nation making up the eastern part of the island of New Guinea which lies immediately north of Australia. I am a research fellow at the Duke University Marine Lab (DUML) in Beaufort, North Carolina.
I am part of a team that studies population structure and species connectivity among invertebrates from hydrothermal vent systems from the western Pacific. Most of our samples were collected from PNG so as you can imagine I have naturally taken up a personal interest in this subject. My ultimate goal is to be able to use the results of this research and other similar work to help identify and design conservation strategies for these unique ecosystems in PNG.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
So one might wonder how I ended up doing this. To answer that question I will have to take you back to my final days as an undergraduate at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). I was a biophysics major and was almost at the end of my program when I realized that my options for employment after college were very slim and I decided to look at opportunities for post grad research at UPNG. I spoke to my physics advisor but he was not so enthusiastic about having me on his projects but told me to come up with my own project.
RTI broadens energy research with federal greenbacks
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 8:54 amTechnologies that promise to lower greenhouse gas emissions and demand for U.S. oil imports are becoming more prominent on RTI International’s research smorgasbord, which has featured efforts in a related field, air pollution monitoring, as a reliable staple for the past 30 years.
RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)
One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.
Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.
Gephardt visits Triangle on tour to spur medical innovation
Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 2:12 pmDick Gephardt is traveling across the country to reinvigorate medical innovation and on Wednesday the former Congressman, U.S. House majority leader and two-time Democratic presidential candidate visited North Carolina, a U.S. biotech hot spot.
U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt
He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.
Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines, making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.
“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. Read more…
Pediatrician takes on rare metabolic diseases
Friday, June 4, 2010, 9:48 am
Dr. Maria Escolar
Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.
Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.
“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said. Read more…
