High-tech research may be key to recovery

By Ben Dobbin
Associated Press

Scientists such as Wayne Knox, whose team is on the cutting edge of fiber-optic development, have many states willing to invest millions of dollars in their research in the hope that high-tech can replace failing manufacturing. Associated Press

That achievement helped speed digital communications, and earned Knox mention in the Guinness Book of Records.

Lured back to his hometown and alma mater a year ago, Knox is now viewed as a brainy beacon who could help play a vital role in widening New York's slice of America's high-tech pie. Already, the University of Rochester professor has hired three top researchers in biomedical and communications optics.

State capitols from Albany to Lansing, Mich., duking it out to build the next money-spinning research hub, are actively recruiting star scientists such as Knox as they lay down heavy bets on optoelectronics, bioinformatics and other odd-sounding hybrid industries they hope will be their ticket to success in the 21st century.

New York alone is investing a record $250 million this year to build four "Centers of Excellence" geared to link top talent in industry and academia and serve as magnets for investment.

Some regard the strategy as crucial in helping struggling cities re-engineer Rust Belt economies at a time when manufacturing is in free fall. For its part, New York lost 40,000-plus manufacturing jobs from 1997 to 2000, more than any state.

Nationwide, state government sponsorship of high-tech research became much more substantial in the early 1980s as global competition forced big companies to dispense with discovery-level research and rely more heavily on academia.

Great Lakes states began putting aside up to $20 million a year to begin the often painful switch from smokestacks to science. But the biggest wave of state investment carried nearly all states with it in the late 1990s.

Using tobacco settlement money, Michigan is investing $1 billion over 20 years to create a life-science corridor between Detroit and Ann Arbor. Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Indianapolis and Kansas City are trying to carve out niches in the life sciences.

Failures are inevitable but "if you don't make the investment, clearly you're not going to go anywhere," said Dan Berglund of the State Science and Technology Institute in Westerville, Ohio. "Even if the research doesn't pan out you're going to have a work force that's better educated, has a higher level of skills and will be able to compete in the global economy."

States that offer a comprehensive package of incentives are likely to come out on top, he said.

One linchpin, most agree, is getting universities to move bright ideas to the marketplace. The University of Rochester boosted its technology-transfer revenues from $3 million in 1999 to $40 million last year.

Another is recruitment, where science stars such as Knox come in.

Born in 1957, Knox designed his first ultrafast laser at age 17 while working a summer job at the University of Rochester. A year after joining Bell Labs in 1984, he generated the world's shortest laser pulse.

Think of the milestone this way: In just over a second, light can race from Earth to the moon; each time Knox's experimental laser blinked, the light had traveled a mere one-tenth the thickness of a human hair.

The more on-off repetitions in a fiber optic system, the backbone of digital telecommunications networks, the more rapidly information can be transmitted.

In 1997, Knox's research team sent 1,021 separate wavelengths of light traveling down a single optical fiber — 64 times the number used by most commercial networks today.

"The world will have to prepare for a time when everybody has a high-speed connection," said Knox, who heads the University of Rochester's venerable Institute of Optics, mixing teaching with research with the help of a $1 million state grant.

Knox is a firm believer in the economic power of the broadband revolution.

"Some people think if we all had broadband it could be worth $300 billion or $400 billion a year. This by itself could pull the entire U.S. economy out of recession."