FORTY FORT, LUZERNE COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU) -- In a time when many wonder about career opportunities of the future, there is one that's showing signs of significant growth. It has to do with helping patients understand and address personal health risk factors.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports nearly 40,000 jobs were created last month in the health sector. Of that sector, one particular field is showing tremendous employment opportunity more than any other job.

What you're witnessing is the future of medicine: unlocking genetic code secrets to personalize treatment and even prevention of certain illnesses and conditions. Both in and out of these DNA labs are genetic counselors who gather and analyze family history and inheritance patterns to help identify individuals and families who may be at risk. "It's so such on the cutting edge of science and technology that it's continuously changing and there are always new things to really keep on top of and excite me," said Geisinger Genomic Medicine Institute Genetic Counselor Marci Schwartz.

Ms. Schwartz works in both cardiovascular and cancer genetics. By the end of 2024, the demand for genetic counselors like her is expected to grow by nearly 30 percent which is greater than any other job sector in the nation. So what's driving that demand? "We are now getting to the point where genetic information is really becoming relevant to clinical care," said Geisinger Genomic Medicine Institute Director Marc Williams, MD.

That care also includes targeted medicine in neurology, pediatrics, and prenatal genetics. Home to the 11 years and counting genome project "MyCode", Geisinger anticipates needing hundreds of genetic counselors in the next few years. "We have a huge opportunity but also this deficit in terms of training personnel," said Dr. Williams. Part of the genetic field job explosion is a recently created position by Geisinger called a genetic counseling assistant.

Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton will soon offer a masters program in genomics but exploring career possibilities in this field can begin much sooner. "Some of the shadowing and volunteer experience can certainly be started in high school," said Ms. Schwartz.

You don't need to be a doctor to become a genetic counselor but you do need a masters degree. The starting salary for this growing profession is roughly $65,000 a year. You can learn more about career opportunities in genetic counseling by clicking here.

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Career Opportunity Explosion in Genetics - PA home page

Dairy makers are hoping pured fruit and genetically screened cows can help win back consumers who have soured on milk.

U.S. milk sales are down 11% by volume since 2000, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Plant-based milk substitutes have taken some of the remaining market share. And a turn away from packaged foods has sapped...

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Dairies' Fix for Souring Milk Sales: Genetics and Bananas - WSJ - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

With the usual mix of anticipation and apprehension, Kaitlyn Johnson is getting ready to go to her first summer camp. She's looking forward to meeting new friends and being able to ride horses, swim and host tea parties. She's also a little nervous and a little scared, like any 7-year-old facing her first sleepaway camp.

But the wonder is that Kaitlyn is leaving the house for anything but a medical facility. Diagnosed with leukemia when she was 18 months old, her life has been consumed with cancer treatments, doctors' visits and hospital stays.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common cancer among young children, accounting for a quarter of all cancer cases in kids, and it has no cure. For about 85% to 90% of children, the leukemia can, however, be effectively treated through chemotherapy.

If it is not eliminated and comes back, it is, more often than not, fatal. Rounds of chemotherapy can buy patients time, but as the disease progresses, the periods of remission get shorter and shorter. "The options for these patients are not very good at all," says Dr. Theodore Laetsch, a pediatrician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

When Kaitlyn's cancer wasn't controlled after three years and round after round of chemotherapy drugs, her doctors had little else to offer. "They said, 'This did nothing, it didn't touch it,'" says Kaitlyn's mother Mandy, a dental assistant from Royce City, Texas. "My stomach just dropped." Kaitlyn could receive a bone-marrow transplant, but only about half of those procedures are successful, and there was a good chance that she would reject the donor cells. If that happened, her chances of surviving were very small.

In a calculated gamble, her doctors suggested a radical new option: becoming a test subject in a trial of an experimental therapy that would, for the first time, use gene therapy to train a patient's immune system to recognize and destroy their cancer in the same way it dispatches bacteria and viruses. The strategy is the latest development in immunotherapy, a revolutionary approach to cancer treatment that uses a series of precision strikes to disintegrate cancer from within the body itself. Joining the trial was risky, since other attempts to activate the immune system hadn't really worked in the past. Mandy, her husband James and Kaitlyn traveled from their home in Texas to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where they stayed in a hotel for eight weeks while Kaitlyn received the therapy and recovered. "The thought crossed my mind that Kaitlyn might not come home again," says Mandy. "I couldn't tell you how many times I would be in the bathroom at the hospital, spending an hour in the shower just crying, thinking, What are we going to do if this doesn't help her?"

But it did. After receiving the therapy in 2015, the cancer cells in Kaitlyn's body melted away. Test after test, including one that picks up one cancer cell in a million, still can't detect any malignant cells lurking in Kaitlyn's blood. What saved Kaitlyn was an infusion of her own immune cells that were genetically modified to destroy her leukemia. "You take someone who essentially has no possibility for a cure--almost every single one of these patients dies--and with [this] therapy, 90% go into remission," says Dr. David Porter, director of blood and bone-marrow transplantation at the University of Pennsylvania. Such radical immune-based approaches were launched in 2011 with the success of intravenous drugs that loosen the brakes on the immune system so it can see cancer cells and destroy them with the same vigor with which they attack bacteria and viruses. Now, with the genetically engineered immune cells known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that were used in Kaitlyn's study, doctors are crippling cancer in more precise and targeted ways than surgery, chemotherapy and radiation ever could. While the first cancer immunotherapies were broadly aimed at any cancer, experts are now repurposing the immune system into a personalized precision treatment that can not only recognize but also eliminate the cancer cells unique to each individual patient.

What makes immune-based therapies like CAR T cell therapy so promising--and so powerful--is that they are a living drug churned out by the patients themselves. The treatment isn't a pill or a liquid that has to be taken regularly, but a one-hit wonder that, when given a single time, trains the body to keep on treating, ideally for a lifetime.

"This therapy is utterly transformative for this kind of leukemia and also lymphoma," says Stephan Grupp, director of the cancer immunotherapy program at CHOP and one of the lead doctors treating patients in the study in which Kaitlyn participated.

Eager to bring this groundbreaking option to more patients, including those with other types of cancers, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously in July to move the therapy beyond the testing phase, during which several hundred people have been able to take advantage of it, to become a standard therapy for children with certain leukemias if all other treatments have failed. While the FDA isn't obligated to follow the panel's advice, it often does, and it is expected to announce its decision in a matter of weeks.

Across the country, doctors are racing to enroll people with other cancers--breast, prostate, pancreatic, ovarian, sarcoma and brain, including the kind diagnosed in Senator John McCain--in hundreds of trials to see if they, too, will benefit from this novel approach. They are even cautiously allowing themselves to entertain the idea that this living drug may even lead to a cure for some of these patients. Curing cancers, rather than treating them, would result in a significant drop in the more than $120 billion currently spent each year on cancer care in the U.S., as well as untold suffering.

This revolutionary therapy, however, almost didn't happen. While the idea of using the body's immune cells against cancer has been around for a long time, the practical reality had proved daunting. Unlike infection-causing bacteria and viruses that are distinctly foreign to the body, cancer cells start out as healthy cells that mutate and grow out of control, and the immune system is loath to target its own cells.

"Only a handful of people were doing the research," says Dr. Carl June, director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center and the scientist who pioneered the therapy. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, June is all too familiar with the devastating effects of cancer, having lost his first wife to ovarian cancer and battled skin cancer himself. Trial after trial failed as reinfusions of immune cells turned out to be more of a hit-or-miss endeavor than a reliable road to remission.

After spending nearly three decades on the problem, June zeroed in on a malignant fingerprint that could be exploited to stack the deck of a cancer patient's immune system with the right destructive cells to destroy the cancer.

In the case of leukemias, that marker turned out to be CD19, a protein that all cancerous blood cells sprout on their surface. June repurposed immune cells to carry a protein that would stick to CD19, along with another marker that would activate the immune cells to start attacking the cancer more aggressively once they found their malignant marks. Using a design initially developed by researchers at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for such a combination, June and his colleague Bruce Levine perfected a way to genetically modify and grow these cancer-fighting cells in abundance in the lab and to test them in animals with leukemia. The resulting immune platoon of CAR T cells is uniquely equipped to ferret out and destroy cancer cells. But getting them into patients is a complex process. Doctors first remove a patient's immune cells from the blood, genetically tweak them in the lab to carry June's cancer-targeting combination and then infuse the modified cells back into the patient using an IV.

Because these repurposed immune cells continue to survive and divide, the therapy continues to work for months, years and, doctors hope, perhaps a lifetime. Similar to the way vaccines prompt the body to produce immune cells that can provide lifelong protection against viruses and bacteria, CAR T cell therapy could be a way to immunize against cancer. "The word vaccination would not be inappropriate," says Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

June's therapy worked surprisingly well in mice, shrinking tumors and, in some cases, eliminating them altogether. He applied for a grant at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health to study the therapy in people from 2010 to 2011. But the idea was still so new that many scientists believed that testing it in people was too risky. In 1999, a teenager died days after receiving an experimental dose of genes to correct an inherited disorder, and anything involving gene therapy was viewed suspiciously. While such deaths aren't entirely unusual in experimental studies, there were ethical questions about whether the teenager and his family were adequately informed of the risks and concerns that the doctor in charge of the study had a financial conflict of interest in seeing the therapy develop. Officials in charge of the program acknowledged that important questions were raised by the trial and said they took the questions and concerns very seriously. But the entire gene-therapy program was shut down. All of that occurred at the University of Pennsylvania--where June was. His grant application was rejected.

It would take two more years before private funders--the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and an alumnus of the university who was eager to support new cancer treatments--donated $5 million to give June the chance to bring his therapy to the first human patients.

The date July 31 has always been a milestone for Bill Ludwig, a retired corrections officer in New Jersey. It's the day that he joined the Marines as an 18-year-old, and the day, 30 years later, that he married his wife Darla.

It was also the day he went to the hospital to become the first person ever to receive the combination gene and CAR T cell therapy, in 2010. For Ludwig, the experimental therapy was his only remaining option. Like many people with leukemia, Ludwig had been living on borrowed time for a decade, counting the days between the chemotherapy treatments that would hold the cancer in his blood cells at bay for a time. Inevitably, like weeds in an untended garden, the leukemia cells would grow and take over his blood system again.

But the periods of reprieve were getting dangerously short. "I was running out of treatments," says Ludwig. So when his doctor mentioned the trial conducted by June and Porter at the University of Pennsylvania, he didn't hesitate. "I never thought that the clinical trial was going to cure me," he says. "I just wanted to live and to continue to fight. If there was something that would put me into the next month, still breathing, then that's what I was looking for."

When Ludwig signed the consent form for the treatment, he wasn't even told what to expect in terms of side effects or adverse reactions. The scientists had no way of predicting what would happen. "They explained that I was the first and that they obviously had no case law, so to speak," he says. So when he was hit with a severe fever, had difficulty breathing, showed signs of kidney failure and was admitted to the intensive care unit, he assumed that the treatment wasn't working.

His condition deteriorated so quickly and so intensely that doctors told him to call his family to his bedside, just four days after he received the modified cells. "I told my family I loved them and that I knew why they were there," he says. "I had already gone and had a cemetery plot, and already paid for my funeral."

Rather than signaling the end, Ludwig's severe illness turned out to be evidence that the immune cells he received were furiously at work, eliminating and sweeping away the huge burden of cancer cells choking up his bloodstream. But his doctors did not realize it at the time.

It wasn't until the second patient, Doug Olson, who received his CAR T cells about six weeks after Ludwig, that Porter had a eureka moment. When he received the call that Olson was also running a high fever, having trouble breathing and showing abnormal lab results, Porter realized that these were signs that the treatment was working. "It happens when you kill huge amounts of cancer cells all at the same time," Porter says. What threw him off initially is that it's rare for anything to wipe out that much cancer in people with Ludwig's and Olson's disease. June and Porter have since calculated that the T cells obliterated anywhere from 2.5 lb. to 7 lb. of cancer in Ludwig's and Olson's bodies. "I couldn't fathom that this is why they both were so sick," says Porter. "But I realized this is the cells: they were working, and working rapidly. It was not something we see with chemotherapy or anything else we have to treat this cancer."

Ludwig has now been in remission for seven years, and his success led to the larger study of CAR T cell therapy in children like Kaitlyn, who no longer respond to existing treatments for their cancer. The only side effect Ludwig has is a weakened immune system; because the treatment wipes out a category of his immune cells--the ones that turned cancerous--he returns to the University of Pennsylvania every seven weeks for an infusion of immunoglobulins to protect him from pneumonia and colds. Olson, too, is still cancer-free.

While the number of people who have received CAR T cell therapy is still small, the majority are in remission. That's especially encouraging for children, whose lives are permanently disrupted by the repeated cycles of treatments that currently are their only option. "It's a chance for these kids to have a normal life and a normal childhood that doesn't involve constant infusions, transfusions, infections and being away from their home, family and school," says Dr. Gwen Nichols, chief medical officer of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

The hope is that while CAR T cell therapy will at first be reserved for people who have failed to respond to all standard treatments, eventually they won't have to wait that long. As doctors learn from pioneers like Kaitlyn, Ludwig and Olson, they will have more confidence in pushing the therapy earlier, when patients are stronger and the cancer is less advanced--perhaps as a replacement for or in combination with other treatments.

The severe immune reaction triggered by the therapy remains a big concern. While it can be monitored in the hospital and managed with steroids or antibodies that fight inflammation, there have been deaths in other trials involving CAR T cells. One drug company put one of its studies on hold due to the toxic side effects. "I am excited by CAR T therapy, but I'm also worried that some people might get too excited," says the American Cancer Society's Brawley. "It's important that we proceed slowly and do this meticulously so that we develop this in the right way."

For now, CAR T cells are expensive--some analysts estimate that each patient's batch of cells would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars--because they require a bespoke production process. If approved, Novartis, which licensed the technology from the University of Pennsylvania, will provide the therapy in about 35 cancer centers in the U.S. by the end of the year. Other companies are already working toward universal T cells that could be created for off-the-shelf use in any patient with cancer. "This is just the beginning," says June.

Since Ludwig's cancer has been in remission, he and his wife have packed their RV and taken the vacations they missed while he was a slave to his cancer and chemotherapy schedule. This year, they're visiting Mount Rushmore, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park before taking their granddaughter to Disney World in the fall. "When they told me I was cancer-free, it was just like someone said, 'You won the lottery,'" he says. "If somebody else with this disease has the chance to walk in my shoes and live past it, that would be the greatest gift for me."

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Cancer's Newest Miracle Combines Genetics and Immune System ... - TIME

A scientist from The University of Manchester has hit upon an innovative way to control greenflies which infest our gardens and farms.

Dr Mouhammad Shadi Khudr, discovered that living lacewing insects- which are used as a way to biocontrol greenflies are also effective after they have died.

Dr Khudr, an evolutionary ecologist based at the University's Division of Evolution and Genomic Sciences, discovered how genetic variations in greenflies' respond to the fear of predation by lacewing known as aphid lions.

The greenflys' genetic variation and life history influenced how they responded to traces of their predator.

He hit upon the discovery while looking at how different lineages of one species of greenfly responded to lacewings on a crop.

Even though each greenfly line had a distinct way of responding to the exposure to the traces of the aphid lion they all suffered from dramatic reduction in their reproduction, he says.

Dr khudr designed and lead the collaborative research, which was funded by the Freie Universitt Berlin (Free University of Berlin).

The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports today.

He said: "Whether alive or dead, lacewings make it more difficult for aphids to reproduce.

"The smell and visual impact of dead predators reduce the greenflies' capacity to give offspring and the way they clump together on the plants they infest."

He added: "This approach is at the crossroads of agricultural, evolutionary and ecological science.

"It is a unique way of understanding the effect of genetic variability corresponding with the risk of predation and thus should receive much more attention.

"It has organic, easy to produce and affordable applications and thus has a promising potential to help solve an age old problem which frustrates many gardeners.

"And it would be most interesting to see if this approach might also work with other pests and biocontrol agents in other agricultural systems."

Explore further: The genetics of life and death in an evolutionary arms-race

More information: Mouhammad Shadi Khudr et al. Fear of predation alters clone-specific performance in phloem-feeding prey, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-07723-6

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Genetics takes fight to gardeners' green foe - Phys.org - Phys.Org

Dairy makers are hoping pured fruit and genetically screened cows can help win back consumers who have soured on milk.

U.S. milk sales are down 11% by volume since 2000, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Plant-based milk substitutes have taken some of the remaining market share. And a turn away from packaged foods has sapped sales of breakfast cereal, a key milk accompaniment.

Milk companies are fighting back with products they are billing as an improvement on the original.

"Innovation is the only way out," said Blake Waltrip, chief executive for the U.S. at A2 Milk Co., a New Zealand-based company that sells milk that lacks a protein that may cause indigestion for some.

Big food makers are testing new products, too. Danone SA's Sir Bananas product combines milk with pured fruit, which it hopes will stand out from other flavored-milk drinks and is now available nationwide. Fairlife LLC, a partnership between Coca-Cola Co. and Select Milk Producers Inc., is selling "ultra-filtered" milk it says contains more calcium and protein than regular milk. It is also offering milkshakes containing antioxidants and prebiotic fiber, which is intended to aid digestive health.

A2 uses genetic tests on its cows to make sure they will produce milk that contains only a protein known as A2, not the additional A1 protein that some research suggests could cause indigestion. The company has captured more than 8% of the market in Australia, up from about 3% in 2012, according to Euromonitor International, in one of the few developed markets where milk sales continue to grow.

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In Australia, where agriculture plays a bigger role in the economy than the U.S., "milk is still seen as a staple," said Alice Yu, research analyst at Euromonitor in Sydney. "Everyone has a bottle of milk in their fridge," she said.

A2 Milk hopes to convince U.S. consumers that its milk can help them avoid the indigestion many people associate with lactose intolerance. "Literally within an hour, the consumer knows whether this solves their issue," Mr. Waltrip said. The company, which started selling milk in California in 2015, has struck distribution deals with Whole Foods Market Inc. and Publix Super Markets Inc.

Competitors and some scientists question A2's claim that milk without the A1 protein is easier to digest.

In Australia, A2 Milk sued competitor Lion Dairy & Drinks alleging that the rival's advertising misled customers into thinking Lion's milk didn't contain the A1 protein. Lion filed a countersuit challenging claims that milk without the A1 protein is easier to digest. A2 Milk says scientific studies suggest a benefit.

A2 Milk will also face competition in the U.S. from fast-growing, plant-based milk alternatives. The National Milk Producers Federation and other industry groups are pushing Congress to bar the makers of those products from marketing them as milk.

The dairy companies are fighting over a shrinking pool of milk demand. Milk sales dropped 14% in dollar terms the year through June from that period in 2013, according to Nielsen figures. That is one reason farmers are pouring excess milk into their fields and manure pits. Farmers in parts of the Northeast and Midwest dumped more than 250 million pounds of milk last year, a recent record, USDA data shows. They are on pace to dump even more milk this year.

Dean Foods Co. lowered profit guidance and saw its shares tumble Tuesday as executives with the U.S.'s largest milk producer acknowledged their struggles with declining fluid milk sales, and no end in sight.

"At some point you will see a bottoming in this category, and I'm not sure when you will predict that," Dean Chief Executive Ralph Scozzafava told investors. The company earlier this year launched versions of its TruMoo flavored-milk drinks that it says are free from genetically modified material.

Nate Donnay, director of Dairy Market Insight at INTL FCStone, questioned whether A2 and other companies charging a premium for their enhanced milks can reverse the broader turn away from the beverage.

"The target market is fairly narrow," he said.

--Jacob Bunge contributed to this article.

Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com and Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 09, 2017 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

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Dairies' fix for souring milk sales: genetics and bananas | Fox Business - Fox Business

ALAMOSA The Alamosa Live Music Association is pleased to present Genetics at Sundays at Six, August 20, in Cole Park, Alamosa. This Denver-based progressive rock band is sure to put on a great show! The concert begins at 6 p.m. and is free.

Genetics consists of four gentlemen from Michigan who decided to move to Colorado with a massive sound, and ready or not, they have hit the ground running. Their complex music with its heavy composition and heavy improvisation, combined with their wide scope of influences shimmering through their dynamic performance, makes for an amazing and unique live music experience.

They have made quite a footprint in the last year alone, not only playing the inaugural Arise music festival but also opening up for acts such as George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Toubab Krewe, Particle, Michael Kang (of SCI), David Murphy (formerly of STS9), Chuck Morris (of Nunchuck and Lotus), Dr.Fameus (Allen Aucoin of The Disco Biscuits), Ultraviolet Hippopotamus, Dopapod, Twiddle, and many more..

Genetics puts their all into every performance, and people are starting to talk. And with a full-length album in the works, and shows at bigger and bigger venues in BOTH Colorado and their home-state of Michigan, Genetics is preparing for a full-scale American brain-invasion.

Genetics is officially unveiling its second full-length album, Beast Mountain. Beast Mountain elaborates on the floaty-with-an-edge composition style, with plenty of unexpected twists and complex melodic layers. But this album also boasts a larger mission: bringing back the glory of the concept album. Evocative soundscapes take the listener on a thrilling journey through the woods, where something dangerous may be lurking amidst the soaring guitar harmonies, linear compositions, and danceable breakdowns. Almost a year in the making, the band recorded and mixed all 10 tracks themselves in their home studio.

ALMA Builds Community through Quality Live Music. For more information like ALMA on Facebook or go to http://www.almaonline.org.

Sundays at Six is generously sponsored by: 1st Southwest Bank, Alamosa Local Marketing District, Alamosa State Bank, Arbys, Body Tune Up, Chilis, City of Alamosa, Comfort Inn & Suites, Crestone Eagle, IHOP, Jay Meyer Insurance, KRZA, KW Farms, Movie Manor, Myers Brothers Truck & Tractor, Partnership Investments, Porter Realty, Rio Grande Savings & Loan, Salazar Natural Meats, SLV Federal Bank, SLV Health, SLV Rural Electric Co-op, Sports Print Plus, Steffens Quality Plumbing, Super 8, Treasure Alley, Valley Courier, Valley Motel, Valley Wide Health Systems, Wall, Smith & Bateman, Xcel Energy Foundation, and 2017 ALMA members.

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Sundays at Six features Genetics on August 20 - Valley Courier

A push to put the power of discovery science back into livestock breeding as brought home a genetics world achiever, writes Andrea Fox.

Last updated09:20, August 10 2017

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Top genetics scientist Dorian Garrick has come home to New Zealand to head a new Massey breeding centre.

Returned world-leading Kiwi scientist Dorian Garrick likes to say his research at a US university was funded by the Islamic jihad.

The leader of the newly-launched Massey University Al Rae Centre for Genetics and Breeding has been able to utterthis little showstopperquite a bit lately in response to predictable inquiries about how he will cope with New Zealand's much-lamentedscience funding squeeze after America's comparative largesse.

It's nota word of a lie, says the professor, lured home from a stellar international career to lend gravitas to a venture which aims to build enviable expertise in quantitative breeding, genetics and genomics to benefit agriculture and create the next generation of scientists with these skills for the plant and animal breeding industries.

For the past 10 years, Garrick has held the Jay Lush endowed professorship chair in animal breeding and genetics at Iowa State University. The genesis of that chair was a $1 million donation from alumnus and Hizbollah kidnap victim Tom Sutherland. Sutherland hoped others who had benefited from the university's pre-eminent animal science programme would follow his lead to build the endowed professorship honouring Lush, considered the father of modern animal breeding and Sutherland's major professor.

Sutherland gave away many millions of dollars to charity after receiving $23 million compensation awarded by an American court in 2001 from Iranian assets frozen over Iran's role in financing Hizbollah militants. Sutherland, who died last year at 85, was abducted in Beirut in 1985 while dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut. He was held for six years, often chained to a wall in darkness, one of dozens of westerners taken hostage in Beirut at the height of Lebanon's civil war.

At his office in AgResearch's Ruakura campus Homestead, Garrick says while it was a boon to be able to tap the fruit of the Iran funds for his research and teaching at Iowa State, there's plenty to be positive about in his new job downunder.

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His salary has dipped a bit but his motivation in coming home was never money, he says. He always intended to return and has kept up his links with Massey, from where he graduated with first class honours in 1981 and which was his first employer. The new job isn't fulltime he's retaining an interest in a genomics software company he co-founded in the US.

But there's no getting away from the fact that the future of new AL Rae Centre, named in memory of another founder of modern animal breeding, Garrick's Massey professor Alexander Lindsay Rae, will depend on cold hard cash as much as the prestige of the Garrick name.

A cornerstone of the new discovery science centre was a $250,000 gift from the Norman FB Barry Foundation which enabled the funding of four PhD scholarships, one postdoctoral fellow, two eminent visiting scientists and funds for workshops.

"It's a small amount in the whole perspective of things but the advantage is it's not dedicated to a particular project. With most of our research grants, by the time you get it, you know where all the money is going to go," says Garrick, who gained his PhD at Cornell in the US.

"That means you don't have the money that if a student walks through the door showing a lot of interest, you can't say sit down, enrol, you're starting tomorrow. Or if we come up with some serendipitous discovery and we want to do a new trial next week, we don't have the funds to do that with research grants.

"Funding an additional student or an experiment can be done with unencumbered funds and that's where donations like the Barry Foundation's are tremendously valuable."

The new centre's co-director and key driver, Massey professor Hugh Blair makes no bones about how important unencumbered cash gifts are to science.

"The country's top students have been enticed away from discovery science in genetics because of greater salaries in banking and other agribusiness areas.

"Low salaries for PhD students in New Zealand have resulted in more attractive opportunities for talented people elsewhere..this has led to under-achievement in discovery science for a number of years, with similar science centres around New Zealand suffering from a lack of resources and a short-term focus driven by an industry keen on solving the issues at hand."

For years, Blair says, there has been a lack of research in quantitative genetics in favour of molecular genetics. "We want to marry these two areas to get a picture of the overall merit of the animal."

Garrick's wasted no time applying to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for "substantial" funds and says some funding is also promised from Beef + Lamb Genetics and DairyNZ. Funding and support conversations are also under way with sector participants such as LIC, CRV Ambreed and the wood industry Crown Research Institute Scion.

Wellington-born Garrick - hardwired for a career in science, his father had a doctorate in shark science - says some things in the New Zealand research science world are looking up since he left the country in 2002 to join Colorado State University, where he stayed for five years before going to Iowa State.

While he supports scientists getting overseas experience and seeking fresh mentors, his exit to Colorado was spurred by a cocktail of negative developments during his time in the AL Rae chair at Massey University, a post he took up in 1994.

"(Initially) I had seven PhD graduates and worked in a range of different industries including forestry. Some students came through our undergraduate ag-science programmes and others from offshore and we did a lot of direct research with industry.

"About that time New Zealand was swinging towards user-pays and capturing intellectual property and keeping ideas secret so they might be patented. The media was portraying agriculture as a sunset industry and the government was funding three year degree programmes rather than four year programmes.

"As each one of my PhD students finished I wasn't able to find a replacement to keep the programme going. I went from seven to zero PhD students. I designed a large experiment for the Dairy Board that would have involved genomics and was hopeful it would allow us to involve a number of graduate students, but Fonterra which inherited the project and created the subsidiary ViaLactica to manage it, wanted it to be kept fairly secret and run on their own properties, not involving graduate students."

The matings for this project had been completed but it would be several years before useful data would be generated for discovery, so it was time to leave, Garrick recalls.

He intended to stay at Colorado university three years but when the time was up New Zealand didn't have the jobs he wanted, which would have involved solving industry problems, publishing the results and bringing in graduate students. He stayed on in America.

"While I've been away the government changed its policy involving graduate students and we've had an increase in the number wanting to do post-grad study. There's been a bit of relaxation over intellectual property and patenting and a recognition that a lot of research is better when it's published or shared than when it's secret."

Garrick says he was approached to return home by parties in the dairy and sheep and beef industries. There was an indication funds might be available for discovery science.

Meantime Massey had met industry stakeholders around the country for feedback on what was required to do a better job on genetic improvement.

"They identified the need for graduate training and for people to work across species and disciplines. All that converged to create the AL Rea Centre."

The Waikato and Ruakura were chosen to host the centre because Massey did not have a direct presence there, it was "neutral" territory, and major industry organisations were headquartered nearby.

Garrick says the first bid for government funding has been made in collaboration with a number of those parties and researchers.

While his statistics mining and computer modelling work on theoretical problems to do with genetic prediction is a foreign language to most of us, his message to NZ Inc and farmers is simple.

"There are fantastic business value propositions for genetic improvement. Many organisations know this already. If they invest in genetic improvement the country will benefit to a much greater extent than the investment (involved).

"But most of them recognise there is market failure in these activities so they need to be partially supported by funding somewhere else. I would like people to recognise that we are here to help. We are here to help train students or perhaps staff already working in those organisations."

Farmers, he says, could encourage their levy funding organisations to invest in genetic improvement activities and to take more of a long-term view.

"I'm always interested in working with ram and bull breeders and have a history of working with them. If they have ideas about doing things differently, we can work with them to help them implement it on their own farms.

"If they see something unusual with a genetic basis, let us know. We have discovered quite a number of genes responsible for diseases in particular because some commercial farmer has contacted us about lambs or calves on their farm with an unusual attribute and we've been able to trace it back and show it comes from a particular sire.

"In many cases we are able to use genomics to find the actual cause or mutation responsible for that effect. Then that allows them to select against that if the attribute is unfavourable. Sometimes if you discover something unfavourable it improves your knowledge about favourable attributes at the same time."

-Stuff

See more here:
Top genetics scientist back for the future - Stuff.co.nz