Tag Archives: Funding

Wheat Rust Research

By increasing the production of wheat it is said Norman Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who ever lived, for which he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. See his New York Times opinion piece: Stem Rust Never Sleeps

Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.

In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.

The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever.

If publicly financed international researchers move together aggressively and systematically, high-yielding replacement wheat varieties can be developed and made available to farmers before stem rust disease becomes a global epidemic.

The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015.

$60 Million for Science Teaching at Liberal Arts Colleges

HHMI Awards $60 Million to Invigorate Science Teaching at Liberal Arts Colleges

A year ago, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute issued a challenge to 224 undergraduate colleges nationwide: identify creative new ways to engage your students in the biological sciences.

Now 48 of the nation’s best undergraduate institutions will receive $60 million to help them usher in a new era of science education. This includes the largest number of new grantees in more than a decade; more than a quarter have never received an HHMI grant before.

Colleges in 21 states and Puerto Rico will receive $700,000 to $1.6 million over the next four years to revitalize their life sciences undergraduate instruction. HHMI has challenged colleges to create more engaging science classes, bring real-world research experiences to students, and increase the diversity of students who study science.
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Creating interdisciplinary science classes and incorporating more mathematics into the biology curriculum were among the major themes proposed by the schools. Many schools will also allow more students to experience research through classroom-based courses and summer laboratory programs.
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HHMI is the nation’s largest private supporter of science education. It has invested more than $1.2 billion in grants to reinvigorate life science education at both research universities and liberal arts colleges and to engage the nation’s leading scientists in teaching. In 2007, it launched the Science Education Alliance, which will serve as a national resource for the development and distribution of innovative science education materials and methods.

Medical Study Integrity (or Lack Thereof)

Merck wrote drug studies for doctors

The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.
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“It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and posted Tuesday on the journal’s Web site.

Merck acknowledged Tuesday that it sometimes hired outside medical writers to draft research reports before handing them over to the doctors whose names eventually appear on the publication. But the company disputed the article’s conclusion that the authors do little of the actual research or analysis.

It is sad that the integrity of journals and scientists is so weak that they leave them open to such charges. The significant presence of the corrupting influence of too much money leaves doubt in my mind that the best science is the goal. Which is very sad. In, Funding Medical Research, I discussed my concern that universities are acting more like profit motivated organizations than science motivated organizations. I am in favor of profit motivated organization (those getting the micro-financing in this link, for example) but those organization should not be trusted to provide honest and balanced opinions they should be expected to provide biased opinions.

If universities (and scientists branding themselves as … at X university) want to be seen as honest brokers of science they can’t behave as though raising money, getting patents… are their main objectives. Many want to be able to get the money and retain the sense of an organization focused on the pursuit of science above all else. Sorry, you can’t have it both ways. You can, and probably should, try stake out some ground in the middle. And for me right now, partially because they fail to acknowledge the extent to which money seems to drive decisions I don’t believe they are trying to be open and honest, instead I get the impression they are leaning more toward trying to market and sell.
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$25 Million to Princeton for Engineering Education

$25 million to support innovation in engineering education

The gift builds on Princeton’s longstanding strength in educating engineers who are broadly grounded in the liberal arts and can reach beyond purely technical approaches to achieve wise and creative solutions. The new center also seeks to extend those connections by creating and supporting engineering courses that attract liberal arts students. For all students, the center emphasizes entrepreneurship, leadership and service.
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“The quality of life for all societies is increasingly connected to our ability to understand, enhance and use technologies,” said Keller. “Since the rise of civilization, engineering has been integral to the development of societies and has helped people lead richer and more satisfying lives. More than ever, we must equip our graduates to be effective and innovative in deploying technology in the service of our nation and all nations.”

Currently, 60 percent of nonengineering students at Princeton take at least one engineering course; one of the center’s goals is to push that percentage to 100. Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science currently offers more than 20 courses that engage students from outside the engineering school. These courses place technology in a social and historical context, emphasize entrepreneurship and provide substantial exposure to issues such as energy, the environment, cybersecurity and telecommunications. The gift will strengthen those courses and encourage the development of new ones. It also will support internships, entrepreneurial activities and a vibrant program of lectures and visiting professorships from leaders in business, government and academics.

“We see all students as engineering students,” said Sharad Malik, director of the newly named Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. “Despite its pivotal role in modern life, engineering has often been perceived as an isolated discipline. I am extremely grateful to have the Kellers’ support in pushing hard in a new direction, shaping an education that spans engineering, the sciences and the humanities and connects academic learning to societal needs.”

6 Inch Bat Plane

image of bat plane

A six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat would gather data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time.

That’s the Army’s concept, and it has awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering a five-year, $10-million grant to help make it happen. The grant establishes the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, called COM-BAT for short. The grant includes an option to renew for an additional five years and $12.5 million.

U-M researchers will focus on the microelectronics. They will develop sensors, communication tools and batteries for this micro-aerial vehicle that’s been dubbed “the bat.” Engineers envision tiny cameras for stereo vision, an array of mini microphones that could home in on sounds from different directions, and small detectors for nuclear radiation and poisonous gases.

Low-power miniaturized radar and a very sensitive navigation system would help the bat find its way at night. Energy scavenging from solar, wind, vibration and other sources would recharge the bat’s lithium battery. The aircraft would use radio to send signals back to troops.

“These are all concepts, and many of them are the next generation of devices we have already developed. We’re trying to push the edge of our technologies to achieve functionality that was not possible before,” said Kamal Sarabandi, the COM-BAT director and a professor in the U-M Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

COM-BAT also involves the University of California at Berkeley and the University of New Mexico. It is one of four centers the Army launched as a collaborative effort among industry, academia and the Army Research Laboratory to work toward this vision of a small, robotic aircraft that could sense and communicate. Each of the four centers is charged with developing a different subsystem of the bat, a self-directed sensor inspired by the real thing.
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$10 Million X Prize for 100 MPG Car

Progressive Automotive X PRIZE

The window for applications will be open until mid 2008, when a thorough qualification process will assess safety, cost, features and business plans to ensure that only production-capable, consumer-friendly cars compete. Those that qualify will race their vehicles in rigorous cross-country stage races in 2009 and 2010 that combine speed, distance, urban driving and overall performance. The winners will be the vehicles that exceed 100 MPG, meet strict emissions standards and finish in the fastest time. Host cities involved in the competition route are to be announced shortly.

HHMI Nurtures Nation’s Best Early Career Scientists

New HHMI Program Aims to Nurture Nation’s Best Early Career Scientists

HHMI will invest more than $300 million in this first group of scientists and plans a second competition in 2011.
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HHMI is focusing on researchers who have led independent laboratories for two to six years at one of the approximately 200 U.S. medical schools, universities, and research institutes that are eligible. Those who are selected by HHMI will receive six-year, non-renewable appointments including full salary and research support while remaining affiliated with their home institution.
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HHMI is seeking scientists from a wide variety of fields, including all areas of basic biological and biomedical research, and areas of chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering that are directly related to biology or medicine.
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Scientists who wish to be considered for this competition must indicate their intention to submit an application by April 30, 2008. The deadline for completed applications is June 10, 2008. Panels of distinguished biomedical researchers will evaluate the candidates’ applications. Final selections are expected to be made by February 2009.

HMMI is an incredible source of funding for science.

NSF CAREER Award Winners

Engineer Roy Choudhury wins NSF Early Career Award

Assistant Professor Romit Roy Choudhury has received a 5-year, $437,000 National Science Foundation Early CAREER award. The distinction recognizes and supports the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become academic leaders
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“A smart antenna is like a spotlight,” Roy Choudhury explains. “It forms a focused beam that can be used to precisely transmit and receive information. This opens up a new realm of possibilities, including concurrent communications, higher transmission range, better information hiding, etc. In contrast,” he said, “old school ‘dumb’ antennas are analogous to lightbulbs. You turn them on and they spread light everywhere, or in this case, interfere with all the other communications around them.”

“Security and privacy are additional advantages of antenna-aware protocols”, said Roy Choudhury. “By focusing your beams intelligently, you may prevent eavesdroppers form listening to your conversation, and even jam them selectively. Such capabilities have obvious implications for national security.”

Through his NSF CAREER project, named Spotlight, Roy Choudhury plans to develop the theoretical basis for antenna-aware networking, design distributed protocols, and implement them on an experimental testbed.

You can get the press releases on CAREER on nsf.gov for 1996-2000? Do they know it is 2008?

Here are some more awardees from this year: Worcester Polytechnic Institute Professor Wenjing Lou – Clarkson University Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Narayanan Neithalath – Engineering’s Ghosh Wins NSF Award for Novel Transistor Research at the Nanoscale – Shengquan Wang is an assistant professor of computer and information science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn – Dr. Glen Jackson, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Bio Chemistry at Ohio University – Dr. C. Heath Turner, Reichhold-Shumaker assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at The University of Alabama

Funding Medical Research

Cheap, ‘safe’ drug kills most cancers

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died

The University of Alberta is raising funds to further the research. Some look at this and indite a funding system that does not support research for human health unless there is profit to be made. Much of the blame seems to go to profit focused drug companies. I can see room for some criticism. But really I think the criticism is misplaced.

The organizations for which curing cancer is the partial aim (rather than making money) say government (partial aim or public health…), public universities (partial aim of science research or medical research…), foundations, cancer societies, private universities… should fund such efforts, if they have merit. Universities have huge research budgets. Unfortunately many see profit as their objective and research as the means to the objective (based on their actions not their claims). These entities with supposedly noble purposes are the entities I blame most, not profit focused companies (though yes, if they claim an aim of health care they I would blame them too).

Now I don’t know what category this particular research falls into. Extremely promising or a decent risk that might work just like hundreds or thousands of other possibilities. But lets look at several possibilities. Some others thoughts on where it falls: Dichloroacetate to enter clinical trials in cancer patients, from a previous post here – Not a Cancer Cure Yet, The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle, CBC’s ‘The Current’ on dichloroacetate (DCA), Dichloroacetate (DCA) Phase II Trial To Begin (“Like hundreds (if not, thousands) of compounds being tested to treat cancer, DCA was shown by Michelakis’ group earlier this year to slow the growth of human lung tumors in a preclinical rodent model.”).
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Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers

The Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, established in 1996, honors the most promising researchers in the Nation within their fields. Nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Participating agencies award these talented scientists and engineers with up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions.

Awards were announced today – links to some of the awardees:

Jelena Vuckovic, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Matthew Rodell, Physical Scientist, NASA
Katerina Akassoglou, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, University of California, San Diego
Carlos Rinaldi, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering University of Puerto Rico at MayagÃ¼ez
Ahna Skop, Assistant Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Krystyn J. Van Vliet, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT
Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Brown University