The Center for Agricultural and Environmental Biotechnology will be operational on RTI’s campus in Research Triangle Park in about two months. Initially, about 15 researchers will work at the center. Construction of a greenhouse, measuring 3,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet, is planned, with room for expansions.

Within a year, the number of researchers working for the center is projected to double to 30 and Lelie plans to establish a computational biology group.

The center will target research that deals with beneficial microorganisms that help clean up persistent contamination and digest municipal or animal wastes into biofuels, as well as with harmful microorganisms, such as bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses. The center also wants to work on making crop plants more drought resistant and produce better tasting. And it will look into domesticating medicinal plants, so natural resources can be protected.

Lelie expects the work to come from government research contracts and collaborations with industry. He has good chances of finding potential research and business partners in or near RTP. North Carolina’s Research Triangle is a hub for agricultural biotechnology. Companies such as Bayer CropScience, Syngenta and BASF CropScience have operations here. (More about agricultural biotech in the RTP area here.)

Lelie talked to Science in the Triangle about setting up the center and getting started:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dr. Robert Gallo, courtesy J. W. Crawford/RTI International

Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, has studied HIV for nearly 30 years.

In 1983, he was locked in a controversial race with French virologist Luc Montagnier to identify HIV as the cause of AIDS. The research results earned Gallo a 1986 Lasker award, also known as America’s Nobel. Montagnier received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008.

The HIV discoveries by Gallo and Montagnier led to an antibody test that helped rid blood banks of the retrovirus and aided in the development of AZT, the first AIDS medicine, at Burroughs Wellcome in Research Triangle Park.

During a presentation Gallo gave Thursday at RTI – during his latest visit to RTP, long a hot spot for HIV/AIDS research – he outlined the clues he followed on the path to identify HIV and the work he’s doing now to develop a vaccine.

After the presentation, he also talked about trying to find a cure for a virus that’s responsible for one of the worst pandemics in human history.

“We know more about this virus than we know about any virus,” he said. “If you knew every hole, rock, crevice, cliff, plant of Mount Everest, could you walk up it? You couldn’t do it, even if you knew everything about it. But you’d have a better chance, because you know the paths.”

Listen to the entire interview:

The race to identify HIV made him world famous, but Gallo is first and foremost a prolific medical researcher who was attracted to retroviruses at a time when most of his colleagues thought the industrialized world was over infectious diseases and retroviruses couldn’t infect humans.

In 1980, Gallo and his team at the National Cancer Institute discovered HTLV-1, the first human retrovirus. HTLV-1 can cause cancers and is transmitted through blood and bodily fluids. More than 20 million people worldwide are infected with HTLV-1, particularly in South America, the Caribbean, Japan and central Africa.

A paper about the HTLV-1 discovery was initially rejected from publication, Gallo said, but the concepts and technologies he and his team had learned helped in identifying HIV a few years later.

In 1986, he and his team discovered a new human herpes virus that was later shown to cause Roseola, also known as baby measles.

In the late 1980s, Duke University tried to recruit Gallo and his group. The offer included about $100 million to establish a virology institute at Duke, Gallo said. But RTP and the Southeast felt foreign to the son of Italian immigrants. Today, he said, he considers it a mistake that he didn’t take Duke’s offer.

His most recent work at the University of Maryland includes an HIV vaccine, which he is developing with Profectus BioSciences, a company he cofounded, and the U.S. Army. The vaccine aims to block HIV from entering its main target, immune cells that kill intruders, and targets preventing infection like the mosaic HIV vaccine that Duke experts are readying for an early-stage clinical trial. (More about the mosaic vaccine here.)

Gallo said he’s also in the process of forming a global virus network by linking research centers of excellence working on all classes of viruses.

Mikki Leach

Michele “Mikki” Leach, 39, is an accountant who joined RTI three years ago.

After moving to Raleigh in 1995 in search for warmer weather, the Michigan native gained deal making expertise at Progress Energy, the only Fortune 500 company with headquarters in the Triangle, and at Waste Industries, where she oversaw financial reporting functions until in 2008 management with the help of investment bankers took the publicly traded company private.

As RTI’s M&A director, her responsibilities are to identify new markets, services and technologies, to evaluate and negotiate deals and then to buy or to sell.

Expect her and her team to step up deal flow in a systematic manner.

“Mergers and acquisitions is a critical component for any company that wants to grow,” Leach said in an interview with Science in the Triangle. “In order to make sure we were doing it in a thoughtful and methodical way and to make sure we were acquiring the right targets for RTI strategically and culturally, we felt that a corporate group would help us do that.”

In the past decade, RTI has increasingly copied from the business world.

Contracts with federal agencies, from the National Institutes of Health to the Department of Defense, still generate about 85 percent of RTI’s annual revenue. But business with commercial customers has risen right along with business with federal customers as the research institute’s annual revenue more than doubled to $718 million from 2000 to 2009.

In 2000, RTI established the first separate business unit to boost revenue from commercial customers. RTI Health Solutions caters to pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies. Two years later, RTI made its first acquisition – a Boston company that used health insurance claims data for health economics research purposes.

At least six other acquisitions have followed since then, the last one last year to broaden RTI Health Solutions’ reach in getting federal contracts.

But RTI has also ramped up research into green technology and alternative fuels. (More about that here and here.) Some of that research has resulted in technologies that RTI would like to sell or bring to market with a business partner, a situation where a director for M&A could be of help.

Watch the interview with Leach to find out what she plans to do:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nanofibers make a better lightbulb

Scientists at RTI International build a lightbulb that is five times more efficient by using a blue light emitting diode, or LED, and nanofibers.

The RTI lightbulb uses a material that is made from fibers much smaller than human hair. The fibers are then coated with photoluminescent material and mounted on a housing that contains a blue LED. But the light that the fibers reflect is white and more pleasing than other energy-efficient lightbulbs.

“Because lighting consumes almost one-fourth of all electricity generated in the United States, our technology could have a significant impact in reducing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions,” said Lynn Davis, director of RTI’s Nanoscale Materials Program, in a prepared statement. “The technology also does not contain mercury, which makes it more environmentally friendly.”

Funding for the project came from the U.S. Department of Energy. Watch an RTI video how the lightbulb is made here.

Bayer CropScience loses second case in GM rice dispute

A St. Louis jury sided with three farmers in Arkansas and Mississippi, who claimed Bayer CropScience was responsible for contaminating U.S. rice crops with a genetically modified strain it was testing. The jury ordered the German company, which has its U.S. headquarters in Research Triangle Park, to pay $1.5 million.

Four years ago, Japan and Europe restricted imports of U.S. rice after the GM strain was found in the U.S. food supply. Prices dropped and U.S. rice farmers suffered extensive losses. Thousands have filed claims against Bayer CropScience.

This is the second case the company has lost. Two Missouri farmers were awarded $2 million in December.

Forum aims to stoke creativity

The unemployment rate isn’t budging. In December, it was 11.2 percent statewide and 9 percent in the Research Triangle area. But speakers during the two-day Emerging Issues Forum in Raleigh had a few suggestions to help us get out of our funk.

The forum, which is a brainchild of former Gov. Jim Hunt, was all about creativity this year – from the role the arts play in economic development to ways that promote out-of-the-box thinking.

One interesting suggestion that came up during the forum that could have particular application in research and product development: Bonuses, organizational charts and patents stifle creativity. More on that here.

I could attend only the Monday morning portion of the meeting, but Sabine Vollmer was at the Symposium for the whole thing and wrote two blogs posts about the rest of the program here and here with a lot of details.

There were four broad themes entertained by the symposium: Personalized Medicine, Behavioral Neuroscience of Alcoholism, Global Climate Change and Education Opportunity and Achievement. Each of the themes had its own breakout session later, but Monday morning was reserved for Keynote Speakers, one on each of the four topics, each of interest to me in one way or another.

Let me first dispose of the things I did not like about the conference before I get into things I liked. Over the past few years, most of the conferences I go to are informal, unconference or unconference-like events: from Scifoo in Mountain View, to Science FEST in Trieste, to ConvergeSouth in Greensboro, to our own ScienceOnline meetings. Even the ‘real’ science meeting I like to go to, the SRBR meeting, is very relaxed and informal – shorts-and-Hawaiian-shirt-clad scientists giving funny and entertaining talks about their new findings in my own field, with internal jokes, calling out friends in the audience and occasional hackling joke from the room (OK, OK, I overstate – folks are mostly nice and polite, especially when the talk is given by someone younger, e.g, a properly dressed graduate student, waiting in attentive silence until the end and then asking proper questions afterwards, but still, the general atmosphere is friendly and relaxed).

I realize of course that different conferences require different setup and different levels of formality. Not everything is a Bar Camp. While I was personally uncomfortable wearing my suit-and-tie costume at the IASP meeting, I understood that this was a business meeting in a business venue with businessmen (and a handful of businesswomen) in business attire talking about business. But this one, I think, was a mismatch. All (or almost all) speakers were scientists talking about science. Almost everyone in the audience were scientists. For this kind of meeting, the organization was far too formal. And not just in pomp and ceremony and dress-code. For example, if you look at the abstracts, they don’t really say anything about the topic of the talk – they go in great detail about the speaker, including all the past and present appointments, awards and honorary degrees. This indicates that the organizers were more interested in the power hierarchy (i.e., ‘look at VIPs we managed to get here to talk’) instead of the substance of what they are saying. It felt more like a big corporate show-off than a conference meant for an exchange of ideas.

Then, there was no time designated for Question & Answer periods after the talks. I wanted to ask questions, but there was just no mechanism for doing so. I understand there were panels afterwards, but even those were built strangely – with panelists, after each gave a separate talk, sitting at a table on a podium above the audience, physically looking down at the audience, thus psychologically inhibiting all but the bravest from actually speaking up. I do not know how it went, but I doubt it was a free-wheeling discussion. Then, the talks. Two speakers actually read their talks. Arrrgh! Yawn (and I was FULL of caffeine).

Others were much better. Howard McLeod gave a good, clear introduction into personal genomics and personal medicine, its pros and cons. Robert Jackson from Duke provided a good summary of the current state of science of climate change. Ronald Dahl talked about adolescent brain development (something I am very interested in, both professionally and as a father of two adolescents), especially the lengthening of the period between onset of puberty which arrives earlier and earlier (the timing of which is not matched by an earlier development of other brain functions, including self-control) and the delay of societally approved age for onset of sexual activity (including marriage). Thus the duration of the period during which adolescents are sexually mature (but not entirely emotionally mature) but discouraged from sexual activity is getting longer and longer – which is an obvious problem. Couple that with the tendency of adolescents to be unable to resist, despite personal fear, engaging in risky behaviors, problems like teen alcoholism and traffic accidents are on the rise.

Lunch Keynote Speaker, Ralph Tarter, was the biggest dissapointment. His talk about bridging the Two Cultures and lessons from Hollywood was surprising for its naivete easily detectable by anyone who’s been reading science blogs for more than a year or so (including Framing Wars, response to Sizzle and response to Unscientific America, along with bloggers who routinely write about history of science). It was infused with nostalgia for good old days when scientists and poets drank wine and talked together (ehm, scientists and poets at the time were the one and the same people – that was Victorian era when gentlemen of means could afford to indulge themselves in such pastimes as philosophy, natural history and poetry and meeting their like-minded buddies at the pub). Science today is a very different business, specialized, expensive, profesionalized and rightly so. That’s progress. The worst part was the lunch talk was the last point – a very erroneous analogy between peer-review of grants and movie reviews. First error: grants are reviewed before they are funded – movies are reviewed after they are funded. Second, as much as the grant review is prone to error, it is still done by well-meaning teams of scientists who are at least trying to evaluate the proposals according to their merits. Yes, outlandish proposals have a harder time than bandwagon stuff or conservative approaches, but it is at least attempted to be done fairly. Which movie gets funded is totally up to whims of movie moguls and producers. I bet even smaller percentage of submitted movie scripts gets actually made into movies than a proportion of grant proposals that gets funded. And while grant reviewers may look at the past publishing records of the grant submitters, the movie magnates are not in any way swayed by the statistics of positive or negative views of particular actors by movie critics in the media.

The highlight of the day was the talk by James Evans. I know Jim well, but I have never seen him speak before. And he blew me away. He knew that all the other speakers on the Personalized Medicine topics will be over-optimistic, so he took it on himself to provide a counter-view, a summary of cautionary notes backed up by data and a nice dose of humor. It was a very energetic and fun talk that explained very clearly what claims by personal genomics companies really mean, why they are so seductive if you don’t stop to think about them, and how they stack up against reality.

The investment reflects how important college degrees are to the economy, the labor pool and the standard of living in the U.S.

But does student financial aid work? What is the taxpayers’ return on the investment?

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded RTI International a $70 million contract to find out.

RTI, a Research Triangle Park institute that employs about 2,800 researchers and technical experts, has collected data on postsecondary students who receive financial aid since 1996. The new, 10-year contract is an expansion and an extension of this work.

The research “provides data that collectively give a comprehensive picture of postsecondary outcomes and their relationship to financial aid,” said John Riccobono, vice president of RTI’s education studies division. (Photo at right.)

“The results of this study will help researchers and federal policy makers better understand and address the affordability of college for families and the effectiveness of financial aid programs,” Riccobono said.

Under the contract, RTI will provide a snapshot of who the students are and what type of aid they receive. The data will come from a nationally representative survey of 120,000 undergraduate, graduate and professional students called National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, or NPSAS.

The survey is conducted every three to four years and includes attendance patterns, type of institution attended and demographic information such as family income.

In addition to the snapshot from the NPSAS survey, RTI will track 23,000 students who are starting their postsecondary education during the 2011-2012 academic year. The Beginning Postsecondary Students study will follow the students for five years and collect outcome data such as degree completion and employment information.

The student sample in the two studies represents about 24 million undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S.