X-ray vision
BYLINE: Clark, Steve
IT was a difficult birth, to say the least, and Junior never really lived up to expectations.
So goes the conventional wisdom about LSU's J. Bennett Johnston Sr. Center for Advanced Microsystems and Design, the country's only state-supported synchrotron radiation research center.
CAMD opponents say it's an expensive lesson in how not to do economic development. Proponents say it's an important hive of promising science.
They're both right, but CAMD is close to becoming obsolete. LSU will soon be forced to decide whether to continue the program-which will require millions of dollars in significant upgrades-or let it go.
CAMD was the brainchild of former U.S. Sen. Bennett Johnston Jr., who lassoed $25 million in federal pork in the late 1980s to build the project he named after his dad.
The center was supposed to make Baton Rouge the next Silicon Valley by, producing the next generation of computer chips. It would anchor a gigantic research park. It would lure Motorola and IBM and create hundreds-maybe thousands-of new jobs.
While none of that has happened, LSU officials insist the center been a success and is worth keeping.
David Ederer, CAMD's outgoing director, says the facility receives heavy use by LSU faculty and students, and lots of great science is happening there. Researchers come from around the country and the world to use the center.
Ederer acknowledges that major upgrades will be necessary if CAMD hopes to stay competitive with other synchrotrons around the country. But he takes issue with the notion that the facility hasn't lived up to its promise.
"It has lived up to its potential," he says. "It has a very strong scientific potential that really hasn't been recognized by the community."
Synchrotrons produce what's known as "soft" x-rays. At the time Johnston was channeling all that pork back in the 1980s, it was believed that soft X-ray lithography was the future in terms of chip-making technology.
That was the bet. Before Baton Rouge could build its synchrotron, however, it had to pick a location-and that proved to be difficult.
Though CAMD was designed as a fabrication center, which didn't pan out, it was also designed for basic science, Ederer says, which makes it an asset to LSU and the state. Once its original reason for being evaporated, CAMD staff members pitched the facility as a scientific resource for AgCenter and environmental science research.
Their efforts have paid off in some measure. Since 2003, CAMD has played a central role in a consortium of eight universities in Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma involved in protein crystallography, which is used to illuminate the molecular structure of complex moleculesuseful for understanding how antibiotics work and how to keep them working.
Among the research currently taking place at CAMD is a study of tiny magnetic particles-cobalt, for instanceand whether they can be attached to a protein and injected into the body to kill cancerous tumor cells. An alternating current could be applied, heating up the particle and thus frying the tumor cell without damaging other parts of the body.
Budget constraints are the only thing keeping CAMD from accommodating more research, says Ederer, who is helping on a proposal for LSU's administration that details what the facility is doing and why it deserves a few million dollars more a year for upgrades on top of about $4.9 million it receives now.
Ederer hopes LSU can some day build a new synchrotron on campus. He says the popular notion that CAMD was an expensive flop is a "knee-jerk reaction based on 20-year-old information."
"If people looked closer, they would see readily that there's lots of science going on here," he says.
Brooks Keel, LSU vice chancellor for research and economic development, says CAMD has been "wildly successful" in terms of the multiple kinds of science being done there and the quality of the faculty it has attracted. He says it has not been successful in living up to the hype.
"If the expectation was that CAMD was going to generate 1,000 jobs, then yes, it was a dismal failure," Keel says. "But you're missing the point if that's all you focus on."
Still, LSU's risk-averse attitude toward establishing relationships with industry kept CAMD from doing much of anything in terms of economic development, Keel says. But while LSU's new order made establishing industry relationships a priority that has already borne fruit, he says CAMD is very close to obsolescence.
Keel, a believer in the "big science" that CAMD represents, is also at work on the pitch to administration that the program is worth preserving and even expanding.
"CAMD has reached the point in its history where we have to make decisions to phase it out or take it to the next level," Keel says. "I've had very frank conversations with faculty. The feeling is unanimous that it would be a huge flop and a serious waste if we let this thing deteriorate and let it go."