Opinion: The Enduring Value of University Innovation

More than ever, higher education is in the throes of a unique struggle to justify its own value in a politically charged atmosphere. As college administrators are under pressure for their leadership, colleges and universities are being subjected to potential reductions in federal or state funding. Important research is being delayed or cancelled outright. The intrinsic value of education and science has become increasingly intertwined in partisan politics. In this challenging environment, it may be beneficial for higher education to highlight its impressive track record of innovation and invention worldwide. Let’s take a deeper dive in appreciating some of these notable university innovations.

THE EARLY YEARS

Innovations in higher education, especially in the STEM fields, can be traced back to the mid-1800s. In 1846 in Europe, Robert Liston at University Hospital in London performed the first operation under an anesthetic. Shortly thereafter, at the University of Glasgow, Joseph Lister “developed his revolutionary system of antiseptic surgery,” which helped reduce post-surgery infection.

U.S. UNIVERSITIES BEGIN TO INNOVATE

In the early 1900s the United States began to appear at the forefront of the world’s significant innovations. Robert Goddard, who dreamed of space travel, began testing rockets at his own expense. He received his master’s degree and eventually earned his doctorate in 1911 from Clark University in Massachusetts. Three years later he received patents for solid and liquid rocket fuel and subsequently received $10,000 in 1927 from the Smithsonian, followed by financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation. With an ardent desire for education and science, his inventions were instrumental in the development of modern rocket propulsion. Goddard’s diaries and news clippings are preserved for review at the Robert Hutchings Goddard Library.

In 1925, Harry Steenbock at the University of Wisconsin developed a mechanism to fortify food with vitamin D, which helped to eliminate rickets, a childhood disease. Steenbock discovered specific fats could be fortified with vitamin D by utilizing ultraviolet light. With $300 of his own money, he filed a patent. Quaker Oats offered $1 million for his vitamin D innovative process (worth over $20 million today), but Steenbock saw greater value in keeping this patent with the university. Interestingly, this decision led to the creation of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).

This foundation, innovative in its day, was created as “an independent, nonprofit corporation run by alumni trustees that would manage the university’s patented technologies and invest the revenue to support future university research,” according to its website. This demonstrated impressive insights by Steenbock, and innovative thinking for the university’s future.
University innovation continued to grow dramatically. In 1940, Charles Drew at Columbia University in New York developed a technique to preserve blood, paving the way for blood transfusions throughout World War II. In 1955, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh. Salk did not receive money for his groundbreaking discovery and wanted to ensure widespread distribution of the vaccine. For the greater good, he chose not to patent the vaccine. He is quoted as saying, “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

ADVANCES IN MRI AND MRNA TECHNOLOGIES

In the 1970s, multiple discoveries and innovations occurred in the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology both in England and the United States. During this period, Sir Peter Mansfield at Nottingham University worked on transforming nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) into a more practical version. In fact, in 1978, he became the first person to step inside a whole-body MRI scanner so it could be tested on a human subject. Research was concurrently being conducted at the State University of New York by Paul Lauterbur, who published the first two-dimensional image generated using nuclear magnetic resonance, and Raymond Damadian, who received over 45 patents for improvements to his MRI scanner, particularly for a full-sized MRI unit. In 2003, Lauterbur and Mansfield both won Nobel Prizes in medicine for their work in MRI technology.

In the 1990s, innovative research into mRNA was taking place at universities across the United States which evolved into the mRNA vaccines utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that an injection of mRNA could produce proteins in mice, which was an important early step in mRNA vaccine development. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers Robert Langer and Daniel Anderson contributed to the development of an efficient mRNA delivery process into cells. At the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Medicine), Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., and Drew Weissman, MD, Ph.D., discovered how to safely use mRNA as a novel vaccine or therapy. These innovations eventually led to the fast development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

WONDERS OF CRISPR

One last worldwide university-led achievement is in the research of CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Basically, it describes the sequence of repeat DNA in bacteria, and the process where bacteria fights a viral infection.

In 1987, a team led by Yoshizumi Ishino at Osaka University first detected CRISPRs in E. coli bacteria. Later, Dr. Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, founding director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, co-invented the gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9, a technology for the precise editing of DNA. This opened an entirely new field of research and development, beyond the field of medicine. The CRISPR editing process can help diagnose, treat and prevent diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. CRISPR also has enormous potential for agricultural engineering and biotechnology. The U.S. National Science Foundation has supported a wide range of research studies with this gene-editing tool.

THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION

While this is just a small sampling of noteworthy innovations to come out of universities and colleges, it is important to remember the significant impact of higher education research. Government funding as well as corporate partnerships can provide the necessary resources to make these innovations practical, sustainable and cost effective. The business sector can also provide students with opportunities to increase their own research and experience. In a 2023 column for Forbes, then-CEO of Anthology Jim Milton wrote, “Business organizations can take the opportunity to partner with universities and colleges to provide students with real-world, tangible workforce experience to prepare them for life outside their education. This can include experiential and work-integrated learning, co-op programs or internships.”

In the end, it may be helpful to think back to Dr. Goddard and his determination to excel as a student, then becoming a professor while keeping his personal dreams alive. He was once quoted saying, “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”