Getting It Together

If the Midwest has one big asset to help build its future, it's the galaxy of great universities scattered across the Midwestern landscape. These are the big state research and land grant universities, the great private schools like the University of Chicago and Notre Dame. Throw in world-class research institutions like Argonne, the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, and we've got intellectual firepower unmatched anywhere in the universe, including the Ivy League. Put all these brains and facilities together, and the Midwest adds up to one big world-class research lab.

The trouble, of course, is that we never put them together. Midwestern universities, like Midwestern states and cities, are Balkanized places, competing for grants and faculty as fiercely as their teams compete on Saturdays. This orneriness, this competitiveness, is a Midwestern trait and guarantees that all our assets, including these intellectual assets, remain much less than the sum of their parts.

What's probably needed is some outside stimulus to jolt these schools out of this mindless scrapping and force them to work together. One logical source is the federal government and its research institutes, which hand out millions of dollars for major projects. We've suggested in this space that it would be a big help if the feds, in spending this money, would insist that its recipients come from different states and different institutions, and that inter-mural collaboration be one condition of these grants. Some of this already goes on, of course, but nowhere near enough. It should be a habit.

That's why the recent news out of the Argonne National Laboratory west of Chicago sounds so sweet. Somebody seems to be getting the picture.

A recent article in the New York Times, produced by the new Chicago News Cooperative and written by former Chicago Tribune science writer Jon Van, talked about how Argonne, the nation's first national laboratory, is ending its use of radioactive materials in nuclear research and is switching to supercomputers to both broaden and deepen its scientific research. The federal government has given Argonne $180 million over two years to make this switch. The goal, Van wrote, is to enable Argonne to take the lead in innovations in energy conservation and other fields.

All this, Van said, is a huge relief to Argonne's neighbors, who were always a little jumpy about those radioactive materials next door. But the most interesting part of the story came near the end. Argonne, it said, "is becoming a resource for major universities in the Chicago area, institutions that are collaborating to bid for more federal dollars for research from a science-friendly White House."

The University of Chicago runs the laboratory at Argonne for the Energy Department. In the past three years, the U of C has invited Northwestern and the University of Illinois to share this management. In the past year alone, the three schools and Argonne have won four federal grants for "energy frontier research centers." More grants have come in from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Now the schools are cooperating to try to win a "energy research hub," a center for major research projects, which could be the biggest deal of all. 

There's more to this than just research -- a lot more. The goal is to turn all this energy research at Argonne into a 21st-century version of the Bell Labs, whose innovations literally powered the 20th century. Bell Labs was headquartered in New Jersey, but its biggest facility was in suburban Chicago, almost next door to Argonne. Over the years, Bell scientists invented the laser, the fax machine, cell phones, solar batteries, the wireless internet, the transistor, long-distance TV transmission and much much more. Each of these ideas, as everyone knows, turned into major industries.

This is why this news from Argonne is so exciting. What's going on is a close collaboration between a cluster of major research institutions, focused on one of the potential transformative industries of this century, energy, and deliberately modelled on an earlier institution whose innovations midwifed the modern world and (not incidentally) created millions of jobs. All this is powered by federal money, which makes it happen. And it works because Argonne is not a university, and hence is not in daily competition with other universities: instead, it is a sort of neutral hub where universities can come together without sacrificing their illusions of independence. 

If the Midwestern economy has a future, it certainly depends on the success of collaborations like the Argonne projects and their replication across the region.

The Argonne musketeers are thinking big -- but they need to think bigger. The three universities involved there are all Illinois institutions. Just getting three Illinois universities to cooperate is hard enough. But why stop at the state line? The Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan both have first-rate engineering schools: why not invite them on board? These states desperately need the economic boost. Where renewable energy is concerned, there's enough research and future projects to go around.

In addition, it's time to start thinking about the economic development that could spin off this Argonne research. If Argonne innovations even begin to approach the ideas that spun off Bell Labs, they will lead to companies, jobs and investments that could define this century. All these companies, jobs and investments will take root somewhere -- but not necessarily in the Midwest. (The University of Illinois, for instance, gave birth to Netscape, only to see it decamp to California.)

It's time now to be thinking about the venture capital, business services and other support that these innovations will need if they are to be exploited in the Midwest. This is another reason to invite the University of Wisconsin to join in. More than any other Midwestern university, it has been able to turn ideas produced by its professors and researchers into companies and jobs, many of which make Madison the lively town -- the "creative city," to use Richard Florida's phrase -- it is today. The U of W has soemthing besides engineering to teach the Argonne dreamers. 

For more news relating to economic competitiveness and education in the Midwest, visit the In the News section of the Global Midwest Web site.

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Took me time to read all the comments, but I enjoyed the article.