Intelligent by Design

If 14th-century Europeans had color-coded dipsticks and electron microscopes, they, too, might have been able to pinpoint the misunderstood and deadly pathogen that claimed as much as half the world’s population.

But Dr. Marty Schriefer, who is developing a simple test for plague, lives in this century—unfortunately for medieval Frenchmen, but potentially very good news for the people of Uganda, among other places.

Schriefer is chief of the diagnostic and reference laboratory for bacterial diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Fort Collins, where he is developing a field test for plague, which is deadly if untreated. The test, which will work sort of like a pregnancy test, will allow doctors to quickly determine whether a patient suffers from plague. It can prevent misdiagnoses for more common ailments like malaria, and it could potentially save lives.

“That's our hope,” he said. “Particularly people in these remote areas and tropical areas (that) have lots of diseases including malaria and others that are kind of on the suspect list when a patient walks in. In the case of plague, we've already established that the treatment opportunity is short, so the correct treatment needs to be initiated very quickly. And this test would enable someone with very few clinical or laboratory pieces of equipment to make that diagnosis quickly and cheaply.”

The work is important to doctors and villagers in rural Uganda and Madagascar, where people contract bubonic plague more frequently than those in developed regions.

But it’s also important in decidedly more parochial terms: It furthers Fort Collins’ reputation as a highly educated, scientifically-minded place to live and work.

Schriefer, who works for the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne and Infectious Diseases’ bacterial diseases branch, is one of hundreds of Fort Collins residents who spend their days in labs hanging out with microorganisms or in clean rooms with computer processors, and their nights in the bistros and cafes of Old Town.

Fort Collins is home to a half-dozen federally funded research laboratories, a group of high-tech firms building everything from computer chips to engine controls, and a university aiming to lead the nation in infectious disease, ultraviolet lasers and renewable energy research.

The city’s high-minded climate attracts businesses, whose leaders know they can reach an educated workforce—so much that at least one firm, AMD, gave up trying to recruit people from Fort Collins and simply moved here.

It brings funding from all levels of the public and private sectors, which improves schools and infrastructure as it increases local tax coffers. It attracts high school teachers whose credentials would make Harvard professors blush, and it even attracts the Nobel Prize.

Boulder may be better known in Colorado’s scientific community for facilities like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the robust space physics programs at the University of Colorado, among other brainy centers.

But Fort Collins has plenty to brag about, too.

“There’s a lot of things going on in a lot of different cities, but this is certainly a very strong aspect of Fort Collins and there are some remarkable things going on,” said Mayor Doug Hutchinson.

He noted the city has one of the top patent-creation rates of any city, with 11.45 patents per year per 10,000 residents. That’s four times the rate of other U.S. cities on average.

Fort Collinsers are smarter than the average bear—48.2 percent of people in the city have four or more years of college, Hutchinson said, quoting a study in Fast Company magazine.

And the people employed here make more money than counterparts in other cities: Fort Collins’ median income is $68,200, according to the same study.

Luckily, scientific research is important even in a weak economy, and Fort Collins is stronger for it.

The labs

In a sterile lab in west Fort Collins, forensics experts track killers in an effort to prevent more costly carnage. They swab kill-scene evidence to collect DNA samples, trying to finger the real culprit.

But the victims are cattle or sheep, and the killers are either wolves or bears.

Scientists at the National Wildlife Research Center study the effects of predators on agriculture and the impacts of invasive species. Because the lab is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, part of the mission is to prevent wildlife-human conflicts in agricultural areas.

Chemists who study animal DNA pinpoint which predator did the deed, and that helps behavioral scientists devise ways to keep them away without harming them. Electrified flag fences work well with wolves, explained Gail Keirn, a wildlife biologist and public affairs specialist at the center.

It works by erecting a rope fence with flags attached that flap in the breeze. The flags contain a slight current, so if a curious wolf nips it to find out what it is, he’ll be deterred from sneaking under the fence to steal a sheep.

“It’s novel to them, so they avoid it,” Keirn said.

Much of the center’s research focuses on invasive tropical species, like brown tree snakes, which infiltrated Guam during World War II and wreak havoc on rodents and other animals who previously had no serpentine predators.

The wildlife center is also one of several facilities involved in studying infectious diseases, especially avian influenza, at one point collecting 80,000 fecal samples to measure the virus’ spread.

The center also studies chronic wasting disease, a prion disease that kills deer, elk and other ungulates and is related to mad cow disease in cattle.

Researchers are working on a cleanser that can destroy the prions, which live in the soil after an animal dies. This is problematic for commercial elk operations; if a population of elk on a ranch was infected with CWD, the land where they lived would have to be abandoned.

Scientists are also working on ways to monitor the disease without having to kill animals. Usually, the best determinant is to examine the animal’s brain — spongelike holes in the tissue are a telltale sign of CWD.

But biologist Dr. Kurt VerCauteren developed a field test which requires a rectal biopsy. It may not be pleasant for the animal nor the field worker, but the animals feel no pain, and researchers are able to test captive or wild herds without having to kill animals first, VerCauteren said.

“It’s tissue that is just in where the sun doesn’t shine,” he said. “It’s not really causing them any sharp pain or anything, so it’s not like they’re jumping around ... it’s not like they freak out.”

The lab also works closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a few hundred yards to the south. Scientists at both labs study West Nile virus and avian flu, among other things.

Emily Zielinski-Gutierrez, a behavioral scientist at the CDC, said many Fort Collins residents probably don’t know much about the work she and others do every day.

More than 200 people work at the CDC facility, which includes a brand-new building that opened in the last year. Scientists study vector-borne infectious diseases — ailments that can be transmitted by migrating creatures like birds or insects — and bacterial infections that can be transmitted from animals to humans, like plague or lyme disease.

Zielinski-Gutierrez said she and other scientists at CDC have watched West Nile virus spread from its initial detection in 1999 to its current endemic state. Researchers in Fort Collins have been at the forefront of West Nile research.

“It’s really interesting to watch the spread of a new pathogen in the U.S., really from its first moments that it was recognized, across a full 10 years,” she said. “But there’s still a lot of remaining questions. Every year, we get all these calls — ‘What’s this year going to be like?’ And it’s like, well, that’s a good question.”

The economic impact

When considering the economic benefits of the region’s research centers, thank Ike.

President Dwight Eisenhower spent many a golfing trip in Colorado, vacationing at the Brown Palace Hotel and visiting his wife’s family—Mamie Eisenhower grew up in Colorado Springs and Denver.

During his two terms, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Interstate 70 (think the Eisenhower Tunnel) came to the state.

By the early 1960s, Boulder and Fort Collins had grown into nationally recognized centers for atmospheric sciences, energy and infectious disease research. The CDC arrived in Fort Collins in 1967.

Businesses followed suit. Engine performance-optimization company Woodward, formerly Woodward Governor, moved to Fort Collins in 1960, for instance.

Later presidents kept the trend going—President Jimmy Carter founded a Solar Energy Research Institute, now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden in 1977.

All that research focus has made the state wealthier in terms of intelligence and real money, according to a report this spring by a non-profit group called CO-LABS, which formed last year to promote Colorado’s research institutions.

In an economic impact study, the group estimated federally funded research contributed $1.1 billion to the state last year, and about $105 million to Larimer County. That number is expected to grow to $152 million in Larimer by next year, the report found.

The report examined the economic benefits of each laboratory, and found the CDC’s Vector-Borne Infectious Disease division, located in west Fort Collins, contributed $30.6 million in economic benefits to Larimer County in 2007. Part of that money is in employee salaries—the average CDC worker earns $84,099 a year—and part of it comes from expenditures in construction and visitors to the lab.

Colorado State University research facilities also bring money to the community. The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, or CIRA, located at CSU, employed 101 full-time workers in 2007. The lab contributed $9,502 in direct economic benefit, but “intangibles” like resident participation in research programs is worth far more. The CoCoRahs nonprofit organization, which encourages volunteer weather observers to report precipitation findings, is based at CIRA.

Larimer-based facilities employ hundreds of government workers, who have much higher levels of education than the rest of the population.

Of the people employed in CO-LABS facilities, a whopping 53 percent have a master’s or doctoral degree, and 32 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree. Compare that to all Colorado residents—the state is considered the first or second-most educated state in the nation per capita, according to the governor’s office, and still only 9.9 percent of Coloradans have graduate or professional degrees.

Private industries in the technology sectors also add to the community—LSI Logic employees are scheduled to spend this Saturday building a home for Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity, for instance.

Even more notable is the fiscal impact on Larimer County students. Schools received $599,000 in property taxes in 2007 from all the labs in the county, the report found.

Educated parents want their kids’ schools to excel, and students are able to visit some of the country’s leading research institutions.

Gail Keirn, a wildlife biologist and public affairs specialist at the National Wildlife Research Center, leads schoolchildren on tours of the center’s library, where they can see various stuffed animals—not the plush kind—and learn about wildlife ecology.

In another example, Poudre High School employs a Stanford-trained theoretical physicist, Gavin Polhemus, who teaches advanced physics courses. Beet Street, a city-sponsored cultural initiative, capitalizes on the city’s wealth of scientists and researchers for its Science Cafe program, and Polhemus packed a coffee shop this fall with his talk about particle physics and dark energy.

The program is one way the city’s wealth of experts contributes to Fort Collins’ uniquely brainy feel. It is a sense not lost on the various tech businesses who have offices in town.

The businesses

Fort Collins is home to so many qualified computer engineers who love their home that one manufacturer gave up trying to recruit them, and moved to them.

Lance Phillips, a senior recruiter for Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, said the company is in Fort Collins partly because of the knowledge base.

The company relocated from a small office Longmont in 2006 and fully 80 percent of the people hired since then are from Fort Collins, Phillips said.

“When we first looked at moving to Colorado, we began the process of recruiting some of the engineers that were here already. We look for microprocessor design engineers,” he said. “And as we started to recruit, we found a lot of those folks didn’t want to move from the area. So for a recruiting standpoint, it became a better decision for us to be here, than for us to get them from Fort Collins.”

AMD has offices in Austin, Texas, Chicago and Sunnyvale, Calif., in Silicon Valley. Workers would have been recruited to those areas. Now that they’re being recruited to Fort Collins, too, it helps that the city has won so many accolades as a good place to live, Phillips said.

“When we recruit people from other geographies to come here, now those are absolutely things in our favor, and strong selling points,” he said.

That’s been the case for Woodward for decades, said CEO Tom Gendron.

Woodward designs control systems for aircraft, power plants and various kinds of engines.

The company works closely with CSU’s engineering department; it helped fund the startup of CSU’s world-renowned Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, and continues research at the lab.

“We do research at the lab, we pay for research, and then we hire those people,” Gendron said. “Our people go back for higher education; we have a lot of Woodward members that are at CSU for master’s degrees, and we also hire a fair amount of CSU people. That’s a positive for our company and the community; we all build on each other.”

Woodward also gave CSU a grant to start a new systems engineering program, led by Ron Sega, a former astronaut.

Gendron said he and others at Woodward know it’s hard to recruit systems engineers, whom he called the architects of high-level, complex engineering projects. So the company gave CSU some money to start a program designed to train more of them. The first crop of students is almost done with its first semester.

“It’s great for the university, but also for our company,” Gendron said.

Woodward’s relationship with CSU highlights how the university furthers the city’s research-intense climate. Businesses take advantage of the university’s graduates and experts, and students gain practical experience as laboratory technicians, interns or postgraduate researchers.

Climate, by the way, is one area where CSU shines. The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, based at CSU and led by Graeme Stephens, looks for answers in global and regional climate changes, weather forecasting, atmospheric modeling and cloud physics, among others.

Stephens recently won an award from NASA for his work on the agency’s CloudSat satellite, which he designed.

The satellite launched in 2006 and its sensitive radar capabilities help scientists understand global precipitation patterns and cloud structure.

Another climate scientist, David Randall, shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year for work he completed on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Randall studies climate models and evaluated the models used to do the IPCC’s suite of calculations.

William Farland, CSU’s Vice President for Research, said climate research is only one part of the university’s focus, which also includes infectious diseases, cancer, veterinary medicine, energy and even ultraviolet lasers.

The university formed “superclusters” in those areas to foster cooperation among educators, researchers and business leaders. It’s partly driven by the land-grant university’s mission of bringing practical knowledge to students and the rest of society.

Federal funding is getting more difficult, primarily because of increased competition.

“When various federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes for Health, begin to double their budgets, there’s a real push on the part of the research community to figure out how they could get a part of that. The ability to get federal funds under that kind of competition is a challenge,” he said.

Making matters worse, federal funds declined during the past two years, making it harder to secure new streams of funding, and NSF budgets have been stagnant for years, meaning they don’t go as far as they once did. And that’s saying nothing of the current lag in state funds.

Still, CSU has continued to grow, and its funding has increased at a rate that exceeds the funds available from federal institutions, Farland said.

“The very successful research institutions have been able to succeed because they established partnerships. They’ve been able to look to other sources of revenue for research like foundations, industry,” he said.

There’s a robust symbiotic relationship between the business community and research facilities, which has led to startups like AVA Solar, which makes photovoltaic cells; Envirofit International, which makes clean-burning cookstoves and retrofit kits for direct-injection engines, and has already won worldwide acclaim; and Solix Biofuels, which will make bio-oil from algae.

Those businesses may not exist if it were not for CSU’s researchers, but that research is driven by a business plan and a worldwide need. That’s the point of superclusters, Farland said.

“You take an area that you’re particularly good in, so you have a critical mass of talent. Take some problems that are global challenges like infectious disease, cancer or clean and renewable energy, and look for ways to accelerate the innovation and intellectual capital that is being developed by the university and move it though,” he said. “The university has not only invested in the academic side, but also in the enterprise side, and that has allowed investigators to continue to work hard in the lab and continue to innovate, while the experts who know about technology transfer and commercial (applications) listen to the outside world, figure out the needs. We are trying to match up the skills that we have in the university with the needs that are out there.”

Mayor Hutchinson said CSU is a major factor in the city’s wealth of scientists and researchers.

He said the environment makes the city’s economy stronger—international companies like Woodward, Intel or Honeywell can insulate the city against the wild U.S. economy.

“That’s an important part of Fort Collins. That helps make our economy a little more resilient,” Hutchinson said. “Some of the people who live in this community point out to me that if there is any place in this economic time to be, Colorado is a good place, and Fort Collins is probably one of the best places in Colorado.”

Take that, Boulder.