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.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded nearly $2 billion – about $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

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. 

Gov. Beverly Perdue, mayors and economic development officials from across the state attended the event, which was meant as a first step to build grassroots support for Gephardt’s to-do list.

At stake is the global leadership position the U.S. built in the past 30 years in discovering new medical treatments, improving quality of life and advancing health care, according to a report the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice released June 10. The Council for American Medical Innovation, or CAMI, an advocacy group Gephardt chairs, commissioned the report.

Experts, investors and bright minds from industry, universities and foundations whose brains the Battelle researchers picked, pinpointed several risk factors that the U.S. is in danger of losing its medical innovation edge.

Among those factors is the declining number of novel medicines that have come to market in the past decade. Between 2005 and 2008, the FDA approved on average 19 per year compared to an average 31 per year during the 1990s. A nearly 29 percent decline in venture capital that set emerging biomedical companies back during the recession was also troublesome. So were the science scores among 12th graders, which declined almost 3 percent from 1996 to 2005.

Health care and research to find new treatments have long been among Gephardt’s interests. What caught his attention was a novel triple cancer therapy that saved his son’s life nearly 40 years ago, he said. Gephardt supported a form of universal health care and helped double the NIH’s budget to support basic research to about $30 billion in 2003.

The unprecedented increase in NIH funding several years ago and a $10 billion boost the NIH received in stimulus funds last year benefited research institutions across the Triangle, including Duke University, RTI International and the University of North Carolina.

But Gephardt’s agenda to spur medical innovation and create more R&D jobs in the U.S. will face a Congress and a White House trying to gain control over a ballooning federal deficit. Gephardt didn’t think the NIH’s budget will be cut, but he acknowledged the belt-tightening mood in Washington by saying that his to-do list isn’t a “big ticket item. Yes,” he added, “this costs money, but the payoff is enormous.”

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.

In 1998, very little was known about Krabbe disease and similar metabolic diseases beyond the fact that they were fatal and no cure existed. Escolar, who now heads the program for neurodevelopmental function in rare disorders at the University of North Carolina Gene Therapy Center, was instrumental in changing that research gap.

In 2005, Escolar co-authored a landmark study on Krabbe disease that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study tracked the development of children with the disease who received transplants of umbilical-cord blood from healthy donors. The treatment was developed at Duke and was based on research Escolar and her colleagues at Duke and UNC did on the symptoms and progression of rare, genetic metabolic diseases.

Today, North Carolina’s Research Triangle area remains one of the few places in the world where children with these diseases are treated and new, experimental treatments are being explored.

During a presentation she made at the May TARDC luncheon at Research Triangle Park headquarters, Escolar outlined how much researchers have learned about the diseases since 1998 and what they still don’t know.

Also known as lysosomal storage disorders, these rare, genetic metabolic diseases are caused by mutations that are either inherited or happen spontaneously. The mutations disable enzymes the body needs to break down fat, protein and sugar molecules and make cell building blocks. Just one faulty enzyme can lead to the accumulation of undigested molecules that damage the brain and destroy the protective myelin sheath around nerves.

Lysosomal storage disorders occur in 1 in 100,000 people. The program Escolar heads at UNC has seen more than 400 affected children, 65 of them with Krabbe disease.

More than 100 of the children received umbilical-cord blood transplants.

Whether the transplants prolonged lives, prevented damage and lessened symptoms depended on the disease.

The transplant prevented cognitive damage in some of the children with Hunter Syndrome, a lysosomal storage disease that affects mostly boys. But others didn’t benefit and researchers are trying to find out why, Escolar said. The results in children with Sanfilippo Syndrome, another lysosomal storage disease, were equally puzzling. None of the children benefited from the transplants, except one boy whose social skills improved.

In children with Krabbe disease, the transplants were most effective when given before symptoms developed. Children who were treated within three months of birth suffered much less brain damage than children who were treated later, but even among the youngest transplant patients some showed delays in the development of motor skills.

“Now we understand that transplantation fixes a lot of problems, but we’re not catching it early enough,” Escolar said. A diagnosis in the first two years of life is crucial, she said. Newborn screening for Krabbe disease, as it was introduced in the state of New York in 2006, would be best, she added.

Researchers are also exploring treatment alternatives. Umbilical-cord blood transplantations have a 15 percent mortality risk, because they require chemotherapy and a year’s worth of immunosuppressive drugs. Some European researchers have tried treating the bone marrow of affected children. At UNC, researchers are looking into versions of gene therapy.

Cryptococcus gattii

In Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia, crytococcus gattii infects eucalyptus trees and bothers people with compromised immune systems, such as HIV/AIDS patients and organ transplant recipients, who inhale its spores. But the strain that was first documented on Vancouver Island, Canada, a decade ago and has now spread to Seattle and Portland causes chest pain, fever, shortness of breath and weight loss in otherwise healthy people and has killed at least six of them.

In February 2007, the first North Carolina case, an otherwise healthy man, was treated at Duke University Medical Center, the Duke researchers reported in PLoS One. In a paper they published a week ago in PLoS Pathogen, the researchers wrote that the cryptococcus gattii strain in the Pacific Northwest was new, much more virulent and favored mammals.

The second Duke paper followed on the heels of a report on human health and climate change that was authored by a group of researchers from several federal agencies. Lead author of the report was Christopher J. Portier, the head of the environmental systems biology group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park.

“The purpose of this paper is to identify research critical for understanding the impact of climate change on human health so that we can both mitigate and adapt to the environmental effects of climate change in the healthiest and most effective way,” the report from the Interagency Working Group on Climate Change and Health read.

Filling research gaps in new diseases and well-known diseases that are coming back because of altered growing seasons, more rain in some areas and droughts in others, more violent storms and rising temperatures has been on researchers’ minds for years.

In the past decades, they have identified 30 new diseases, including hepatitis C, avian flu, HIV/AIDS and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, according to a 2004 report in Nature Medicine. Environmental changes are among the reasons for the emerging diseases. But researchers have also tracked a resurgence of previously documented diseases in new geographic areas, among them tuberculosis and cholera.

The report from the federal interagency working group zeroed in on the following research areas:

• More mold, dust, pollen and air pollution are likely to increase the prevalence of airway diseases such as asthma and respiratory allergies, which already affect about 50 million Americans.
• More information is needed on how climate change affects exposure to toxins and chemicals that might boost cancers, with about 500,000 deaths per year the second leading cause of death in the U.S.
• Heat waves and rising global temperatures could increase the number of heat-related illness and death. The 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, caused about 35,000 deaths.
• Some birth defects linked to environmental causes have been steadily increasing.
• Exposure to biotoxins from ever more frequent, harmful algal blooms and chemicals from new batteries and compact fluorescent light bulbs could boost neurological and waterborne diseases.
• By 2050, about 200 million people are expected to be displaced by the effects of climate change. The population relocation and the changes in temperatures could cause a resurgence of diseases caused by insects, such as malaria and yellow fever, which were once rampant in parts of the U.S.

“Salamanders can regenerate. Why can’t we?,” Atala asked during a TEDMed talk last fall.

Dr. Anthony Atala

Actually, we can and we do, he responded Tuesday during a presentation at Research Triangle Park headquarters, where he had traveled from Winston-Salem to talk at the TARDC luncheon. “It’s real,” he said.

The human body replaces bones every 10 years, skin every two weeks and intestinal tissue every six days. Regenerative medicine taps into the body’s ability to regrow tissue, expands on it and speeds it up in the laboratory.

The aim is to cure diseases with the help of spare parts the body doesn’t reject.

Researcher are already able to grow most tissues in the lab. Cartilage cells have been used to repair damaged knee ligaments since the mid-1990s. In 1999, Atala was the first to implant a laboratory-grown organ into a patient. The organ was a bladder.

Now researchers are working on skin, blood vessels and entire livers, kidneys and lungs. Within a decade or two, they may be able to make a whole heart, repair a damaged spinal cord or implant insulin-producing beta cells to erase diabetes.

A three-day forum the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine held two weeks ago to bring together researchers, investors and companies developing products explored some of the promises and challenges in the field.

The promise of regenerative medicine is in the wealth of products moving through the regulatory pipeline. More than 50 research and development programs are under way to come up with products, Atala said at the forum. About 10 clinical trials testing products in patients have either started or are about to start and another 50 trials are scheduled over the next four years.

Challenges include making the products and convincing the health care system to pay for them.

At the TARDC luncheon Atala brought up one example to outline costs and benefits of regenerative medicine: About 90 percent of the patients on transplant lists are waiting for kidneys. While they’re on dialysis, they cost the U.S. health care system about $250,000 per year each. Kidneys grown in the lab would not only shorten the wait for a transplant but also lower costs for dialysis and for drugs that prevent rejection of tansplants.

How much is a lab-grown kidney worth, Atala asked. “$50,000? $100,000? $200,000?”

While regenerative medicine companies are giving this question a lot of thought, researchers in the labs are addressing challenges of making the products, such as growing enough tissue from a cell sample half the size of a postage stamp to cover an area the size of a football field in about 60 days.

The Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine uses five different approaches in the lab, Atala said. “We’re trying to see which strategy gets us there first.”

• In experiments to make whole livers, researchers have washed discarded organs with mild detergents to extract the liver cells. What remains is a collagen scaffold that looks like a liver and contains a vascular tree. Researchers then seed the scaffold with new liver cells or stem cells.
• To build whole hearts, researchers use a three-dimensional printer whose cartridge is filled with gel and cells rather than ink.
• An experiment that involved steers and cows used stacks of wavers seeded with kidney cells. Because an organ doesn’t fail until more than 90 percent of its function is gone, the tissue wafers promise to add enough functionality to a badly damaged kidney to keep a patient off dialysis.
• Researchers inject stem cells or the patient’s cells to regenerate tissue.
• In cases where tissue is needed that doesn’t grow in the lab, researchers use stem cells harvested from amniotic fluid.

Here’s Dr. Atala’s talk at TEDMed:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But the benefits of modern medicine go well beyond combat surgery.

Dr. Margaret Humphreys

Dr. Margaret Humphreys, a Duke University professor in the history of medicine and a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, issued a reminder Tuesday during a lecture at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh that germs bag a bigger punch than bullets.

“It wasn’t until World War I that more soldiers died from wounds than from disease,” Humphreys said during her lecture on the role malaria and yellow fever played during the Civil War.

Before the onset of modern medicine, infectious diseases had much influence on daily life, even during peaceful times. But it was during war, when food was scarce, sanitation was non-existent and many soldiers lived in close quarters away from home, that diseases brought on by viruses and parasites flourished.

The Bubonic plague ravaged parts of Europe during the Thirty Years War. Smallpox was a problem during the American Revolution. Typhus fever crippled Napoleon’s army. Yellow fever and malaria contributed to twice as many soldiers dying from disease than from wounds during the Civil War, Humphreys said, but malaria was of particular importance to the outcome of the war.

For much of the 1800s, Americans suspected bad smells had something to do with disease. They knew disinfectants made the odors go away and people who were exposed to them and didn’t die could become less vulnerable. But not until the 1880s did Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, raise the idea that microorganisms, or germs, existed and spread disease. It would take another two decades before mosquitos were identified as carriers of yellow fever and malaria.

Until then, “they don’t know about the mosquito,” said Humphreys. “Think poisonous air and bad smells” – and lots of them.

The first yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia in 1793 and several more followed in ports along the East and Gulf coasts during the next century. In 1862, an outbreak in Wilmington sickened about one-third of the town and killed 446 of the town’s 5,000 residents.

Yellow fever was feared, Humphreys said. About half of the severe cases ended in quick deaths from liver and kidney failure.

In 1864, Luke Blackburn, a physician and supporter of the Confederacy who would later become governor of Kentucky, tried to use dirty shirts and sheets from yellow fever patients in Bermuda in one of the earliest known cases of biological warfare. He packed the sheets and shirts in trunks with the intent to have them delivered to Northern cities, including one bound for President Lincoln’s White House.

There’s no record the trunks reached their destinations and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Even though Blackburn had much experience treating yellow fever in the American South, he had no idea the virus didn’t spread through personal contact.

Library of Congress map showing prevalence of malaria in 1870s.

Yellow fever traveled on ships and mostly affected U.S. ports. Malaria came aboard European immigrants and African slaves and was widespread. A mild version, called vivax malaria, came from Europe and affected even areas with temperate climate. The more severe and deadly version, called  falciparum malaria, came from Africa and required the warm and humid climate of the American South.

During the Civil War, malaria raged in coastal North Carolina, the South Carolina Sea Islands, the Mississippi delta and on the James River peninsula in Virginia.

The combination of yellow fever outbreaks and falciparum malaria made the southern lowlands so dangerous, Confederates considered the diseases their secret weapons, Humphreys said. Southerners believed that “when the Yankees come down here, our very land will throw them out.”

But Union troops had two advantages that made a difference, particularly in battling malaria: Up to 10 percent were African-American and had at least partial immunity and the North had unrestricted access to quinine, a medicine that was regularly dispensed.

The blockade of Confederate sea ports limited the South’s access to quinine, especially after 1864, Humphreys said. Southern women smuggled the medicine in their hoop skirts and the South developed an alternative made from willow, poplar and dogwood bark and whiskey. But the “Southern quinine” didn’t work.

Also, the North brought along its own diseases, such as smallpox and measles, she said. And in the end, the Union suffered fewer deaths from disease than the Confederacy.

R&D spending as percentage of federal budget, FY 1962-2009

Sure, federal spending on R&D more than tripled in the past 50 years to about $147 billion in fiscal year 2009, as Lane pointed out Saturday in a talk at N.C. State University. But R&D’s share of all federal spending has been shrinking from nearly 12 percent during the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s to about 5 percent in 2009, according to numbers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Lane, a professor at Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, is particularly concerned about federal funding for research in physics, mathematics and engineering, the disciplines that brought forth computers, the Internet and mobile devices such as the cell phone.

AAAS numbers show that much of the increase in federal R&D spending over the past 30 years has gone to biomedical disciplines. Last year, funding for the National Institutes of Health made up about half of all federal spending for basic research and for R&D that was not aimed at defending the U.S.

Neal Lane

“We do have a president who cares about science,” Lane said. He called the scientists whom President Obama appointed as scientific advisors and government administrators a “terrific team.” But considering the rising federal deficit, budget shortfalls and polarized political leadership, Lane added, “I’m worried that federal research spending will get squeezed.”

Lane visited NCSU on invitation of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, or PAMS, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But his talk had significance beyond PAMS, even beyond NCSU, one of many U.S. universities tasked with educating tomorrow’s scientists, furthering technological development and feeding the U.S. knowledge economy.

Federal R&D spending is the lifeblood of the entire Research Triangle area, a state economic engine and national R&D hot spot that is known around the world.

Research Triangle Park, which has NCSU, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as its corners, reflects the federal R&D funding evolution that began during World War II. Work to establish RTP began in 1957, the same year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite. The science park opened in 1959, just as the space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. got under way.

In the past 30 years, RTP’s development has mirrored the shift in federal R&D funding priorities from the space age with its focus on national security to the age of medicine and a new focus on health. Today, first signs are emerging that RTP, which employs more than 40,000, is tapping into the next phase in federal R&D funding, a phase that focuses on renewable energy, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and technologies that reduce the U.S. dependence on oil.

This phase rests on climate changes that remain controversial even though scientists have tracked them for years.

“The threat of climate change is out there,”  Lane said. “But it’s less urgent than the economy, jobs and health. The message is muddled. There’s some work for us to do out there.”

About 60 percent of all Americans consider public funding for R&D essential, according to a 2009 survey report from the Pew Research Center. More than 70 percent say that government investments in basic research and engineering and technology pay off in the long run.

Despite the broad support, Lane said, “science has never really emerged to be important at the ballot box.”

Scientists have to do a better job conveying this public support to the politicians, he added. “We have to figure out how to be more helpful, how to interact better with the public.”

Where are the scientists and engineers?

Why? Because it could help the U.S. remain a technology exporter in a world where emerging countries such as China and India are gaining ground.

“China is a rising player,” Lane said, pointing to AAAS numbers that show about one-quarter of the world’s 5.8 million scientists and engineers were in the U.S. in 2006. China had about 21 percent and the number was rising, Lane said.

A similar picture is emerging in R&D spending. The U.S. still spends more on R&D than any other country, but Asian countries are turning up the heat.

To bolster his argument that the U.S. is in danger of falling behind, Lane referred to writings by Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin. In a 2007 essay called “Is America falling off the flat earth?” Augustine quotes UNC President Erskine Bowles:“Think about this: in the past four years, our 15 schools of education at the University of North Carolina turned out a grand total of three physics teachers. Three. And we’re going to compete with those guys in Asia? Come on – not that way.”

Today, I asked Sabine Vollmer 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?

I’m a journalist by trade and a thrill seeker by nature. There’s nothing more thrilling to me than Eureka! moments, my own and those of others. That’s why I chose to study journalism instead of biochemistry, why I left Germany to come to the U.S., why I enjoy reporting more than writing. Writing keeps me sane, but finding out stuff I didn’t know keeps me going. In the more than 20 years I worked for newspapers, I covered just about everything: Crime (too emotionally draining), politics (too much hot air), business (too much granularity, not enough color) and science. I got stuck on science about 10 years ago after moving
to North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the Eureka! moments keep on coming.

Becoming a science writer was a logical step for me, because I’ve always been interested in science, particularly in biology and chemistry. I took a heavy load of biochemistry classes in high school (German high school is different from American high school), but selected mass communication as my major at the university in Munich. I have never regretted my decision, because it has allowed me to experience scientific breakthroughs without having to toil in the lab doing experiments over and over again.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Most of my expertise is in the life sciences. My sweet spot is where business and research intersect, mainly because those stories dominate in the RTP area. I moved here to cover biotech, pharma and health care for the Triangle Business Journal and then switched to the News & Observer to essentially write about the same things.

About a year ago, my job at the N&O got cut in a massive, nationwide McClatchy layoff, which so far has been largely a blessing. Now, I get to focus more on the science than the business angles, I get to mingle with scientists and I have more outlets. In the past year, I met three Nobel Prize laureates, including Ada Yonath, a 2009 winner in chemistry. Compare that to a big, fat 0 in the previous eight years while I was a staff writer with a regular paycheck and benefits.

My stories are now published on Science in the Triangle, an online publication that tracks research activities in the RTP area, and in the Science & Technology pages in the N&O and the Charlotte Observer.

Science in the Triangle is a current interesting project. Past interesting projects include a story about AZT, the first HIV/AIDS drug that was developed in RTP, and a couple of investigative stories about laser assisted in-situ keratomileusis, or LASIK. The AZT story was a doorway into HIV/AIDS research, a very active area in RTP, and Harvard Medical School picked it up and posted it on its Web site. The LASIK stories have since garnered the interest of a national magazine.

I’m still waiting for the curse part to hit.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

The RTP area generates a wealth of research in a number of different disciplines. Until four or five years ago, local media did an adequate job chronicling the activities. But when the bottom fell out in the newspaper industry, the local science coverage started to decline in quality and quantity. I just couldn’t bear the thought that all this local knowledge would become largely inaccessible to the general public and that the research silos that exist would become more impenetrable. I couldn’t and I can’t imagine how that would improve an area I came to appreciate for its intellectual vitality and cultural diversity.

I spend a lot of time applying my skills and expertise trying to fill the holes in the local science coverage, generate enough income to help feed and house the family and learn from the mistakes my former employers made and are still making.

My goal is to make a national name for myself writing about research and development in the RTP area.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I’d like to see a business model for online science writing emerge that values quality content and provides broad access to new ideas.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

Blogs come in different flavors. I’m trying to find time to start a personal blog and keep it going. For now, most of my blogging is for Science in the Triangle, where I provide information and analysis rather than opinion. I absolutely love Twitter, because it’s fast and insightful if you follow the right people. Basically, I use Twitter like a science wire service, to get ideas and to distribute blog posts. My twitter handle is @SciTri. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but I wouldn’t want to be without any of my social networks.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I’m still discovering them and have yet to form much of an opinion. I do find them very interesting as blueprints of publishing alternatives to the traditional, or “dead-tree” as you call it, media.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

The Eureka! moments, of course. It was my first ScienceOnline conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was great. It brought me up-to-date with a world I realized I knew nothing about as a staff writer for the dead-tree media. The networking was particularly fruitful for me. What I hope next year’s conference will address more and more specifically is a possible business model for online science writing. We need to figure out how to shift from paper to online and still be able to pay the bills.

It is great working with you. I am glad you made it to ScienceOnline2010 and thank you for the interview.

Rebecca Skloot

When I found out Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” would be back in the Research Triangle area to promote her book, I grabbed the opportunity to talk to her. The result of the conversation was published Monday in the Science & Technology pages of the News & Observer.

Skloot is spending three days in the RTP area. She visited Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh on Monday and N.C. Central University in Durham on Tuesday. She will speak at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in Durham.

Her previous visits here included ScienceOnline 2009, where she was the keynote speaker, and ScienceOnline 2010, where she was one of the panelists.

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/03/22/401128/author-on-tour-to-share-story.html?storylink=misearch#ixzz0j3VTfKAL

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