Des Moines Register
07-23-06
Letters to the Editor
REGISTER READERS
ISU could be leader in bioeconomy of the future
Richard Doak is absolutely correct when he called on all of us in Iowa — elected
officials, university officials, researchers, business leaders and the public in
general — to “think big” about the state’s public universities, well beyond athletics
(July 15). One area where Iowa State University has been thinking very big, and
where the impact for Iowa is huge, is in biobased products and renewable fuels.
Iowa is the best place in the world to grow the plants that will fuel the
bioeconomy of the future. Iowa should also aspire to be the very best place to
develop the new varieties of plants and the ways to use these plants to make the
biorenewable products that our world will increasingly need — without adversely
affecting our food supply.
Iowa State already has one of the leading plant-sciences research-anddevelopment initiatives in the nation, including one of the leading biorenewable
products-research programs.
There is tremendous potential for Iowa in biobased products, such as fuels,
building and industrial materials, and pharmaceuticals, and with the knowledge
resources at our universities, Iowa is poised to take on national, even world
leadership in this effort.
However, we are in a race with many other universities and states, most of which
are devoting much more public money to these efforts than Iowa has. We are
very grateful for the funding that the governor and state Legislature have
provided to our plant sciences and biorenewables research efforts, but this level
of funding is not nearly what is needed to support our ability to truly “think big”
and out-compete other states. A the same time, the rest of the university —
including the infrastructure that supports research and development in the
biological sciences — has suffered greatly from four consecutive years of budget
cuts.
The bioeconomy is emerging now. Public and private interest is very high in
developing new products such as fuels from biorenewable resources, from
federal government initiatives by President Bush and Congress and huge
corporate interest.
We need to focus our financial resources in Iowa in the areas that will pay the
biggest dividends for the state, and the greatest of those right now is in biobased
products and renewable fuels. Iowa needs to significantly increase its public
investment in these efforts and in the infrastructure to support them at our
universities. Our record shows that this investment will be multiplied many times
over in terms of leveraging financial support from outside Iowa in order to create
a truly world-class program in biorenewable resources.
We need to seize this opportunity now to not only “think big,” but also to achieve
big.
— Gregory L. Geoffroy, president, Iowa State University, Ames.