By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- In a warren of rooms in the French Family Science Center on the Duke University campus, grad students sit on stools staring at screens that show the work of a mass spectrometer, which measures properties of light over a specific portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Periodically, there's a loud, explosive sound, a whoosh of nitrogen gas getting vented. No one notices, because the researchers in Michael Fitzgerald's lab are so focused on the work they are doing, measuring the stability of proteins.

For the less-scientifically inclined, Fitzgerald, an associate professor of chemistry, suggests using a car as an analogy.

"We know some basic things about cars, like how to turn them on and drive them," he said. "But we don't really know how the engine works. That's what we're trying to do with proteins -- we really want to understand how they work."

Proteins are gene products, and they are involved in a wide variety of biological functions. When you know how they work, you can figure out what's wrong with them when they don't work, such as in cancers. And then, maybe, you can figure out how to make it right.

"We don't really understand how gene mutations lead to a disease," Fitzgerald said. "We need that fundamental understanding of how these proteins work to do that."

To help the analytical chemists in his lab do that, the National Science Foundation this summer awarded Fitzgerald $390,000 over three years. The award was one of nearly 500 separate grants that have come to local university researchers through the federal government's stimulus funding program.

Researchers at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill together have raked in nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of the overall $15 billion offered by the government with the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act last February. The influx has given an extraordinary boost to local scientists and fundamentally changed the morale at both schools.

"We are basking in the glow, no question," said James Siedow, the Duke vice provost for research said. "It's really helped our spirit. People were down in the dumps, and in some respects, this is really a windfall."

With cuts in state funding, said Tony Waldrop, UNC's vice chancellor for research and economic development, morale had been low. "Everyone had been asked to work harder, for less, and it was really good there was this very positive sign of federal support."

The funding has had a more tangible effect as well. It has helped save jobs and in some cases allowed new hiring.

At Carolina, through September, officials say 137 jobs were created or retained because of stimulus funding. They are expecting more than 400 such jobs retained or added through the two-year funding period.

Kyle Cavanaugh, vice president for human resources at Duke, said the stimulus money has allowed the university to keep or add 166 positions, "and that includes a variety of different positions, post-doc positions, graduate assistants, technical positions and some faculty positions, too."

All the money did not come into Duke and Carolina by accident. Both created elaborate operations to help and support their researchers in accessing the funding.

"We did this one right," said Siedow. "We set up an ARRA tracking team, at the outset, hired some extra people, pulled some people part time to become an ARRA reaction team, and that team just did a wonderful job. The team knew there was going to be an influx of proposals and essentially put everything else on hold to do this. It was like a World War II mobilization."

The schools knew the competition for the funding would be intense. There were, for instance, more than 20,000 challenge grant proposals submitted to the funding agencies; only 840 were funded, "and we got between 11 and 20 of them," Waldrop said.

Both schools ended up exceeding the amount of funding administrators had expected. However, there is concern over whether there are any more pots of money at the end of the rainbow.

"That's why 'how to maintain?' is the question that's facing us," Waldrop said. "What happens when this money runs out? We did not hire additional people in our infrastructure office for exactly that reason; we did not want to have a situation in two years where we had to lay off people."

Siedow called the funding "kind of a mixed blessing."

"It's a pretty big bolus of money, and it's A good thing to have, of course," he said. "But now comes the hard part. If that money is a one-time thing and it goes away, we don't want to drop off the cliff in a couple of years. There could be a real hangover if we don't get more money later."