On cutting edge.

Byline: GREG BOLT The Register-Guard

THE QUEST for knowledge does not follow an easy road.

Delved from laboratories and libraries or pulled from the earth or the heavens, knowledge accrues bit by bit as curious people mine it from the unknown. It is the job of the researcher to illuminate knowledge, and at the University of Oregon, the light is on.

In the coming year, the UO will spend close to $70 million to add new chapters to the book of knowledge. That's not a kingly sum on the roster of research universities - Johns Hopkins spends almost $900 million a year on research - but it supports the work of more than 2,000 professors, research assistants and graduate students who investigate everything from quantum physics and molecular biology to the life of stars and the stuff of life.

These are heady times for research. Advances in computing, biosciences and genomics are moving scientists to the brink of history-changing discoveries, breakthroughs that could see the final stroke in the war against age-old diseases and open a window on the birth of the universe.

Like researchers across the planet, UO scientists and thinkers have been drawn by the light of knowledge. It's a pursuit that has brought people to universities since they were first established in the Arab world more than a thousand years ago.

"I think it's the fact of human history that makes research inevitable," UO philosophy professor Naomi Zack says. "We're constantly moving ahead, so there's constantly new information that has to be processed. That's what happens at a research university. I see that as a core mission."

Outside the university, though, the research mission often is obscured by the commitment to education. Educating students - primarily undergraduates - is what most Oregonians think of first when they consider the value of publicly funded universities.

But without research, many professors will say, there would be nothing new to teach, and education would be little more than rote memorization of old texts. Without the fresh air that comes with discovery, education would turn stale.

"Research is so important to society in terms of helping us live better lives," says Marjorie Woollacott, a professor of exercise and movement science. "Part of the basic human desire is to understand the world we're living in and then also make it better for ourselves and other people."

But the value of research often must be subordinate to the university's education mission. As state support for higher education has fallen further behind in the wake of voter-approved tax limits and the current recession, institutions have scrambled to protect undergraduate instruction and access, often at the expense of research and public service.

The current economic crisis is likely to wipe out the small amount remaining of the $20 million the 2001 Legislature allocated for research at all state universities for the 2001-03 biennium. State support for research at the UO has increased only modestly, from $2.2 million in 1993-94 to $4.4 million in 2000-01, and amounts for the current and coming year will likely drop below present levels.

Rich Linton, vice president for research and graduate studies at the UO, says less than 2 percent of state appropriations for higher education is specifically designated for research. In fact, the UO now brings in almost as much outside money for research - almost $70 million - as the total it gets from the state for all purposes, or about $75 million.

Linton says a recent survey of registered voters showed that only 2 percent felt that having faculty involved in nationally recognized research was a top priority for Oregon universities. He believes that most people probably understand that there's more to a university than teaching, even if the whole scope of research isn't foremost in their minds.

"I think at least the majority would have a notion that professors do some kind of research or scholarly work," he says. "But it may not necessarily sink in that there's that research mission to the university."

Universities have made up for the lackluster state support by turning increasingly to outside sources for funding. The largest source is the federal government, which last year provided $43.7 million for research at the UO, a 30 percent increase from 1993-94.

The investment in research earns benefits beyond slaking the thirst for knowledge. Linton says that each dollar spent on research generates one to two dollars in economic activity, and that multiplier effect means UO research adds at least $150 million a year to the state economy through wages and salaries and purchases from local businesses.

"The economic benefits of investments in university research are impressive," Linton wrote in a recent report on research activity. "The UO research enterprise is responsible for thousands of jobs and many millions of dollars of earned income to Oregon workers and their families."

But research is more than an economic activity. While the UO has bolstered its efforts to turn research into marketable products in recent years, much of the work done at the university still is basic research begun mainly to answer questions rather than create a product.

As the state's leading liberal arts and sciences university, the UO's research effort runs across the academic spectrum. It includes professors who are creating new works of literature and poetry, new music and dance and new understanding of history and religion as well as those who labor on the frontiers of science.

Zack, who is highly regarded for her work on race as a cultural phenomenon, says research of all sorts is nothing less than the diary of human civilization. And it's a book that new generations of scholars are constantly updating and amending.

"At research institutions, you have people contributing to this growing body of knowledge that constitutes the record of this civilization," she says. "If you didn't have research, a college education could do no more than recycle the research that other people have done."

One area where the UO is plowing lot of new ground is the College of Education, which has consistently ranked among the top graduate programs in the United States.

The college pulls in more than $20 million a year in outside research funding, and its special education program has been ranked No. 3 in the nation two years in a row.

Researchers in the college have produced a number of breakthroughs, including anti-violence programs now in use nationally as well as strategies for early intervention and helping children better prepare for school.

The UO also is emerging as a leader in brain imaging and neuroscience with the recent installation of a research-grade magnetic resonance imaging device, a $3 million instrument that will help researchers better understand the inner workings of the brain. It's only the second such instrument installed outside a medical school in the United States.

The university has more than 20 institutes that attract the bulk of research dollars, many of them built on an innovative, interdisciplinary model pioneered at the UO that mixes scientists from different but related fields to help stir innovative ideas. Among them are the Institute for Molecular Biology, the Materials Science Institute, the Oregon Center for Optics and the Institute of Neuroscience.

But scientists aren't alone on the research frontier. University professors also pursue research in the humanities through the efforts of the Oregon Humanities Center, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Oregon Survey Research Laboratory and the Center for Housing Innovation, as well as the work of individual professors and graduate students in fields ranging from English to economics.

In all fields, graduate students are often the oil that keeps the research machinery running. When professors are teaching, it's graduate students who run the experiments; and when the professors are doing experiments, it's graduate students who teach.

The UO enrolled more than 3,800 graduate students this year, 1,600 of them as doctoral students. The research necessary to complete a thesis and earn a doctorate adds muscle to the university's research arm. "They are the driving force behind the work we do," biology professor Roderick Capaldi says.

Undergraduates, too, benefit from research, even if they aren't the ones doing it. Professors say research improves their teaching and that teaching improves their research.

"I think what's important at a university, and at the University of Oregon, is that in a sense you shouldn't cut off research from teaching," Capaldi says. "It's been my experience that by being involved in cutting-edge research, I'm a better teacher because of it."