|
Messenger-Inquirer
February 4, 2005
Biotech Alliance seeking $600,000 for greenhouses
Owensboro has the potential to become "one of the major players in plant-based
pharmaceuticals," Large Scale Biology Corp.'s senior director for manufacturing
told the Greater Owensboro Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.
Barry Bratcher said only 44 acres were used in the United States last year
to grow pharmaceutical products inside plants. And 35 acres -- 80 percent --
belonged to Large Scale, a California biotech company whose manufacturing facility
is in Owensboro's MidAmerica Airpark.
Planet Biotechnology, another California biotech company, also has an Owensboro
office and a deal with Large Scale to extract its tooth-decay prevention product
from tobacco leaves.
Eric Davis, president of the chamber and Economic Development Corp., said the
32,000-square-foot Large Scale facility is "the window to Owensboro from
the world. From all over the world, people have come into this community to
see that facility."
The advanced technology center that the community has been trying to get the
state to build at Owensboro Community and Technical College would have 8,000
square feet for biotech studies, he said.
But Davis said to enhance its chances of attracting more biotech industry,
the community needs a year-round "growing center."
What he's talking about, Davis said, is two to four greenhouses or buildings
with "grow lights" to raise tobacco in the fall and winter months
when it's too cold to plant the crops outside.
Because the plants are closely spaced, he said, the growing centers would only
need about 5,000 to 10,000 square feet each. They could be placed on farms,
Davis said.
He said the Owensboro Biotechnology Alliance is working with U.S. Rep. Ron
Lewis and the staffs of U.S. Sens. Mitch McConnell and Jim Bunning to secure
a $600,000 grant for the buildings from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The alliance -- EDC, OCTC, the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture,
private industries and area farmers -- has been working on the grants for the
past two years, Davis said.
Originally, it sought $2 million in grants. But Davis said they were told that
there was a better chance of getting $600,000.
Large Scale owns five local greenhouses where it grows pharmaceutical-bearing
tobacco plants year round.
The plants are "sandblasted" with a virus containing pharmaceutical
products. And the virus rapidly spreads through the plants. Then, the plants
are harvested and the drugs are squeezed out of the plants in a liquid form.
Bratcher said Large Scale can produce up to 3,000 metric tons an hour at its
Owensboro facility.
Earlier this week, the company announced that Schering-Plough Animal Health
Corp. had extended a research collaboration agreement that calls for Large Scale
to produce trial quantities of several vaccines for control of viral infections
in animals.
Ronald J. Artale, Large Scale's chief operating officer, said the company is
"pleased with the excellent tone and progress in the collaboration."
Large Scale is also working on vaccines to treat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, ovarian
cancer and Fabry disease, a rare genetic disorder, along with several other
products.
Bratcher said growing pharmaceuticals in plants cannot hurt humans. "We
don't get diseases from plants," he said.
And he said there is no danger of the products getting into other plants in
nearby fields.
Using plants is cheaper than building facilities to manufacture drugs, Bratcher
said. And it reduces the time needed for production to between 15 and 18 month
from concept to clinical trials.
Kentucky New Era
February 3, 2005
Film series to feature documentaries
HOPKINSVILLE -- Individuals in the Pennyrile region may view the world through
the eyes of documentary filmmakers during the spring semester Hopkinsville Films
series at Hopkinsville Community College.
The issues-oriented community education film series will feature seven documentaries.
The series kicks off Friday with "Devil's Playground," a documentary
about Amish teens. Also among the featured films are the Oscar-nominated fast
food indictment "Super Size Me" and Oscar–winner "Harlan
County, USA."
The public is encouraged to watch the films in the auditorium lecture hall
with the community college faculty. Following each film, the faculty will lead
the audience in brief discussions. Pre-registration is not required. A $2 registration
fee will be collected at the door that includes the film and continuing education
workshop/discussion following the event.
All films will begin at 6 p.m. The scheduled films include:
"Devil's Playground" -- a documentary about Amish teens, Friday.
"When We Were Kings" -- a nostalgic and insightful look into the
Foreman/Ali "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match, Feb. 18.
"Super Size Me" -- a look into the legal, financial, and physical
costs of Americans' hunger for fast food, March 4.
"Harlan County, USA" -- an Oscar-winning film about eastern Kentucky
coal miners' violent strike against Duke Power, March 18.
"The Knowledge of Healing" -- contrasts the success of Tibetan holistic
healing methods with Western medicine, April 1.
"What the Bleep Do We Know?!" -- uncertain world of the quantum field
revealed behind normal, waking reality, April 22.
"Salesman" -- Maysles Films landmark documentary about a quartet
of Bible salesmen, April 29.
The film series is intended to provide HCC students and the Pennyroyal region
with films by directors who push the medium and test the artistic limits and
films that bring up important social, philosophical and psychological issues,
according to a press release from the college. These films normally cannot be
seen on the big screen in the local area or even found easily in video stores.
For more information, contact Melanie Lee at HCC at 886-3921, ext. 6206.
Kentucky River News
February 4, 2005
HCTC’s Stephanie Klawes headed to Australia
Hazard Community and Technical College student Stephanie Klawes has worked
to have a well-rounded education and she’s about to embark on another adventure
to enhance her educational pursuits. She’s going to Australia to participate
with The International Mission on Business. The trip will definitely round out
her experiences while she is in Australia May 23 to June 3.
“I want to get more training in business, a larger outlook on the business
world and to learn about other cultures,” noted Klawes, when citing the
reasons for participating in the international schooling.
While there, she will be participating in sessions called “Building Bridges
with Business,” “The Impact of Business on the Environment,”
and “The Art of Business – Managing, Mediating and Marketing.”
Ms. Klawes, age 19, is from Bledsoe in Harlan County and the daughter of Lucy
Klawes.
Klawes has met many challenges in her young life but a big challenge facing
her now is raising the money needed to make this trip.
A total of $5,399 is needed to get her from Kentucky to California and then
on to Australia. So far, she’s only raised $600. She’s taking out
a loan to pay for the trip because the full amount must be paid by Feb. 16,
but anyone wanting to make donations can send checks made payable to Stephanie
Klawes at 601 Jefferson Avenue, Jackson, KY 41339.
Ms. Klawes has the encouragement from Hazard Community & Technical College
to make the trip.
She’s active with the Student Leadership Institute (SLI) and SLI Director
Steve Jones was excited about this opportunity for her.
“When Stephanie informed me she was offered this opportunity I responded
by telling her that good things come to those who work hard and that her efforts
and abilities had been recognized thus her nomination,” Jones said. “Stephanie
is someone who is very confident, productive, assertive and very decisive. When
it comes to her leadership style she is task-dominant and very committed to
accomplishing her goals. She has the skills to be very successful in the business
world and would make an excellent employee. Stephanie’s contributions to
the SLI are numerous. She continues to be the one SLI participant who makes
the perfect role model for current and future SLI students. Other SLI students
look up to Stephanie when it comes time to provide leadership to upcoming projects.”
HCTC President Jay K. Box noted Stephanie was nominated by the National Dean’s
List. He praised her overall grade average of 3.8 while still serving as president
of the Students in Free Enterprise and president of Resident Life.
Kentucky River News
February 4, 2005
Check out Weekender at HCTC
Hazard Community and Technical College is starting something new called Weekender—a
chance to get an education by attending classes on just Fridays from 4 p.m.
to 9 p.m.9:00 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Beginning with the Fall
2005 semester, Weekender classes will be scheduled in an accelerated, web-enhanced
format. Each class will last approximately four weeks so one class will be scheduled
each month, following an approved rotation. Completion of the approved rotation
will fulfill the graduation requirements for an Associate of Arts degree.
“This mode of delivery will give students much more flexibility than
the traditional college scheduling format, which is particularly beneficial
to students who work and/or have other obligations restricting their time,”
noted Germaine Shaffer, Enrollment and Diversity Services director. “The
complete associate of arts degree program will still take approximately two
years to complete with scheduled breaks in instruction,” she noted. Classes
offered will include computers, English 101 and 102, history, foreign language,
science with lab, math, social interaction, science, and communications.
“This is an innovative approach to getting an education,” noted
Dr. Jay K. Box, HCTC president/CEO. “We understand that there are people
who can benefit from this non-traditional approach and we hope they will take
advantage of this new plan.”
Those who have questions about this program, please contact Glenna Fletcher
at telephone extension 73502. You also may email her at Glenna.Fletcher@kctcs.edu
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 7, 2005
President plans no price controls or strict accountability rules for colleges,
new Education Secretary says in interview
The Bush administration has no plans to impose price controls on college tuition
or to extend strict accountability measures to postsecondary institutions, the
new U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, told The Chronicle in an
exclusive interview on Friday.
In a wide-ranging discussion at the end of her first official week on the job,
Ms. Spellings also said that states and college governing boards, not the federal
government, should be responsible for ensuring that campuses foster a variety
of political and religious beliefs.
The comments were the first extended remarks Ms. Spellings has made about higher-education
issues beyond her confirmation hearing last month. As the president's domestic-policy
adviser in his first term, Ms. Spellings was one of the chief architects of
the No Child Left Behind Act, which in 2002 introduced nationwide standards
and mandatory testing to elementary and secondary schools. Some college officials
have feared that she would use the law as a template for similar measures in
higher education (The Chronicle, November 26, 2004).
But the secretary said on Friday that the administration's efforts in higher
education over the next four years would focus mostly on providing better information
to parents and students. As the parent of a high-school senior, the secretary
said, she has experienced firsthand how difficult the college-search process
can be for families.
"It's a hard process to navigate ... where your kid ought to go to college,"
Ms. Spellings said. "I think we can do better."
Without accessible and easy-to-use government sources of information about
colleges and financial-aid options, the secretary said, families have come to
"rely on, for right or wrong, the U.S. News & World Report, the Princeton
Review, and some of these other sorts of rankings, which are fine and good,
but I'm not sure there is an understanding about what all goes into that."
While Ms. Spellings was not specific about the range of information that should
be made available to the public, she said, as an example, that parents should
be able to find out easily how long it will take their child to graduate from
a particular institution, how much it will cost, and what are the chances their
child will still be enrolled after two years.
She did not give any details about how the administration would require colleges
to provide such information or on how the government would disseminate what
it collects to the public.
"We're very early in this whole process," Ms. Spellings said. "The
first thing you would want to do is start at the beginning and say what do you
want to know that we don't know, what do we know. That's where we ought to start."
Better information would particularly be helpful, she said, when it comes to
tuition. Last year Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, the California Republican who
heads the principal subcommittee on higher education in the U.S. House of Representatives,
dropped a proposal that would have penalized colleges that raised their prices
too high by preventing them from participating in some federal student-aid programs.
Some Republicans and Democrats said his proposal would have amounted to price
controls in higher education.
Ms. Spellings said that in putting together its proposals for the reauthorization
of the Higher Education Act, the federal law that governs most federal student
aid programs, the administration "wouldn't start with price controls."
"This is where information can play a real part," she said. "What
are the costs, how fast are they escalating, what are the reasons."
So far, Ms. Spellings said, she has been encouraged by the reaction of colleges
to the administration's call for more and better information for families. "I
think they want to be able to tell their story better," she said. "They
are served when they can do that with real data and no anecdotes."
When asked if college campuses have a liberal bias, Ms. Spellings said, "Some
institutions do and some institutions don't." But she said the federal
government should not get involved in policing professors' politics, even after
incidents like the controversy at the University of Colorado at Boulder in which
a faculty member compared the victims of the September 11 attacks to Nazis (see
a related article).
"That's not something the federal government is going to get into,"
she said. "It's a local-control thing. That's something for states and
governing boards and academic faculties to see about. I hope they do worry about
those things."
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 4, 2005
Bush budget will propose a recall of federal funds from Perkins loan program
The Bush administration's budget for 2006, due out on Monday, could mean the
end of the Perkins loan program.
In that budget, the president will ask Congress to recall the federal share
of institutions' revolving loan funds, according to a top Education Department
official. The funds, which are made up of federal "capital contributions,"
institutional matches, and repaid Perkins loans, are used to make new loans
to students from low-income and middle-income families.
The recalled money would be used to increase the maximum Pell Grant, to eliminate
a $4.3-billion shortfall in the Pell Grant program, and to increase loan limits
for students in their first two years of college, said Sally L. Stroup, the
assistant secretary of postsecondary education.
Ms. Stroup said the department had taken aim at the Perkins program because
of its limited reach -- it serves only 3 percent of students and 800 institutions
-- and because of its "ineffective" ratings in recent budget analyses.
"For us to run a program that serves only a handful is not cost-effective,"
Ms. Stroup said. "This is one where we think we can invest the money better."
Colleges made $1.263-billion in loans averaging $1,875 to 673,000 borrowers
through the Perkins program in 2004. The recall of the federal share, which
amounts to more than $7-billion, would be phased in over 10 years, Ms. Stroup
said.
Defenders of the program said the Bush plan could mean serious trouble for
the program. Under the Bush plan, "there would be no [federal] money to
lend out," said Thomas E. Schmidt, associate director of the office of
student finance at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, which awarded $6.4-million
in Perkins loans to 3,300 students last year. "We would have nothing to
give to our students."
Mr. Schmidt said many of the Perkins recipients at his institution had already
"maxed out" on federally guaranteed student loans, and had been turned
down for private loans because they had not built up credit histories.
President Bush announced last month that he would seek to raise the maximum
Pell Grant by $500, to $4,550, over the next five years and to eliminate the
shortfall by making changes in the federal guaranteed-student-loan program (The
Chronicle, January 17). In addition to pulling out of the Perkins program, Mr.
Bush will propose paying for his Pell Grant plan by reducing some subsidies
that the government provides banks and other types of lenders for making low-interest
loans available to students.
The president will also back a proposal by key Republican lawmakers in the
U.S. House of Representatives that would save money by making a federal program
for consolidating student loans less attractive to borrowers. Under that plan,
borrowers would be unable to lock in a low, fixed interest rate for up to 30
years, as they can now. Advocates for students and many Democratic lawmakers
oppose that change (The Chronicle, June 4, 2004).
Higher-education advocates said the Perkins program had been in the administration's
cross hairs for some time, noting that the president and Congress provided no
new money for capital contributions in the 2005 fiscal year. In that budget,
the department said the loans were "no longer necessary" because the
revolving funds "will continue to support more than $1-billion in new Perkins
loans each year."
Harrison M. Wadsworth, executive director of the Coalition of Higher Education
Assistance Organizations, said that it would be a "mistake" to transfer
the revolving funds to the Pell program because the loan program is self-sustaining
and the federal contribution "leverages" a 25-percent institutional
match -- each federal contribution of $3 draws a $1 match from the college.
"The grant is a one-time shot," said Mr. Wadsworth. "What do
you do next year? I hope Congress recognizes that students need the Perkins
program."
The Perkins program also offers loan forgiveness to borrowers who work in teaching,
law enforcement, nursing, or other high-need fields after they graduate. Many
students at Concordia College in Minnesota take advantage of that incentive,
said Jeanne F. Dotson, director of student loan and tuition repayment. Of the
college's 2,900 students, 700 received $1.7-million in Perkins loans last year.
"This is going to affect a lot of people," said Ms. Dotson. "This
is a tested and proven program."
Under the president's plan, colleges would retain the $2-billion that is their
share of the revolving funds, Ms. Stroup said. But it is unclear whether colleges
would opt to continue the program in the absence of federal support. Given the
administrative costs of running the program, Lori S. Hartung, legislative co-chair
of the coalition, said she wondered "how motivated would schools be to
maintain the program."
Whether or not they do, teasing out the federal government's portion of the
revolving fund will be very complicated because the institutional match and
the interest earned on the revolving fund have fluctuated over the years.
"One of the difficulties is determining whose funds these are," said
Sarah A. Flanagan, vice president for government relations at the National Association
of Independent Colleges and Universities. "Depending on the interest rate,
the value of the returned dollar may be more or less than the value of the dollar
that went into the program."
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 7, 2005
High-school graduates are poorly prepared for work or college, survey finds
As many as 4 in 10 high-school graduates are not ready for the demands that
they face after graduation, whether they are going to college or to work, according
to survey findings scheduled for release today.
Acheive Inc., a nonprofit organization created by state governors and business
leaders that focuses on raising academic standards, surveyed recent high-school
graduates, employers, and college instructors about the preparedness of young
people entering college or the work force. The poll of 2,200 people was conducted
in December and January.
According to a report based on the survey, college instructors thought that
the recent graduates' greatest deficiencies were in writing and mathematics.
Students largely concurred, with 81 percent saying they approved of graduation
tests in math and English.
Many students who responded to the survey indicated that it was easy to slide
by in high school, but said they would have worked harder if more had been asked
of them, said Geoff Garin, one of the pollsters. In particular, students pointed
to academic counseling and course requirements as areas to bolster.
"This survey should be a real wake-up call to the governors around the
country," said Gov. Bob Taft of Ohio. "We're hearing a clear message
from our graduates that we do them no favors if we set the bar for performance
too low."
Socioeconomic circumstances were not a decisive factor for success, Mr. Garin
said. Rather a high level of expectation proved essential for graduates no matter
what their goals, he said, since many of the same skills now are necessary for
both work-bound students and those continuing their education.
The full text of the report, "Rising to the Challenge: Are High School
Graduates Prepared for College and Work?," is available on Achieve's Web
site.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 7, 2005
Ratings agencies predict mixed financial outlook for higher education in 2005
Colleges and universities will continue to face debt, aging facilities, and
needs for technology upgrades this year, according to separate reports by Moody's
Investors Service and Standard & Poor's Ratings Services. The outlook isn't
all bad, however, with the credit-ratings firms predicting higher levels of
private support and improved investment performance by higher-education institutions.
"The good and bad news combined could mean that the higher-education sector
will continue to exhibit more ratings volatility in 2005 than is typical for
the sector," says the Standard & Poor's report, released last week.
"Nevertheless, recent ratings activity is mixed. For two years, 2003 and
2004, there were nearly as many upgrades in the sector as downgrades."
Like most other industries, higher education is experiencing increases in the
costs of health care, insurance, security, and post-retirement benefits, and
is also paying higher wages. In addition, the Standard & Poor's report says,
many colleges and universities have "aging and obsolete" facilities
that could hinder their ability to attract the growing number of high-school
students who will graduate through 2012.
"The amount of investment necessary to renew these facilities and invest
in new technology is staggering," the report says. "These costs will
either be funded through state capital outlay for public universities, through
annual operations, gifts, or the issuance of additional debt."
The Moody's report, expected to be released this week, is similarly mixed,
noting that during 2004, factors that contributed to credit downgrades included
increased debt, above-average endowment spending rates, and declining enrollments.
Private institutions had the most downgrades last year because of employee-related
cost pressures and facilities investments. Public universities showed stronger
student demand and improved state support, according to the Moody's report.
College and universities have been able to increase private donations, recapturing
some of the momentum experienced in 2000, according to Standard & Poor's.
Most institutions conducting campaigns are on track to meet goals, and many
will announce fund-raising campaigns with "unprecedented goals" this
year.
Endowment investment performance has also rebounded, with many institutions
regaining ground that was lost in 2001 and 2002. State support for public universities
increased in the 2005 fiscal year and is expected to be flat for 2006.
"U.S. Higher Education 2005 Outlook: Favorable Revenue Trends Help Offset
Rising Costs," by Standard & Poor's, is available for purchase by calling
212-438-9823 or sending an e-mail message to research_request@standardandpoors.com
The Moody's report is available to nonsubscribers at 212-553-1653.
|
