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The Doyle Initiative: Prescription for a Healthy Wisconsin

If you allow your imagination to wander, you can imagine a world 10, 15 or 20 years from now that is quite different from what we know today. Imagine a world where we are not going to our doctors to find out how to treat heart disease or diabetes, but to find out how to prevent them. Imagine a world where we are not wondering how long it will be until our parents’ mental capacity succumbs to Alzheimer’s, but one where we can stop the disease from progressing and allow them to maintain a high quality of life. Imagine a world where we are not worried about losing highly skilled workers to states on the East and West coasts because we do not have enough jobs, but where we are wondering whether we can produce enough of those workers to meet the needs of Wisconsin businesses.

By Charles Hoslet

http://www.corprelations.wisc.edu/buswire/commentary/20041201_hoslet.php

Such is the promise that the recent announcement by Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle holds. The governor’s initiative to invest nearly $750 million in public and private funds over the next 10 years on cutting-edge research and the necessary infrastructure will go far toward keeping Wisconsin healthy, both physically and economically.

Funding for the proposed Wisconsin Institute for Discovery will allow University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers — and others around the state with whom they routinely collaborate — to expand their understanding of areas such as genomics and proteomics, regenerative medicine, bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

Basic research in these areas will lead to the development of tools for solving human health conditions and diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s and various types of cancer. Funding for a new research facility at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee will enable us to learn more about infectious disease control and cardiovascular illnesses. And funding for a new Alzheimer’s research initiative will bring us closer to being able to halt the progression of Alzheimer’s disease or prevent it altogether.

As if improving our health was not reason enough to support the governor’s initiative, consider the economic implications. To start, this plan calls for more than $300 million in construction over the next few years; that in itself will generate more than $460 millionin economic impact on the state.

Further, the U.S. Department of Commerce tells us that for every $1 million of research and development spending, 36 new jobs are created. Jobs that, on average, pay more than double the current per capita income in Wisconsin. Research and development spending in Wisconsin already accounts for almost 32,000 jobs, and this initiative will allow that number to grow as the research facilities that are built will help Wisconsin researchers attract even more research funding from the federal government and other sources.

In the long term, the technology developed by these researchers will be commercialized and companies will be formed based on those technologies. UW-Madison itself is responsible for the creation of more than 175 Wisconsin companies, most of which have been started in the last 10 years. These firms have created more than 7,000 jobs and have aggregate gross revenues of more than $1 billion. Other UW System campuses, most notably UW-Milwaukee, have begun to see companies spin off from technologies developed by their researchers. An increasing number of startup companies are coming from the Medical College of Wisconsin and Marshfield Clinic as well.

Doyle’s initiative is bold and not without its detractors. In a time of lean state budgets, reasonable people can disagree on where to invest scarce state resources. But the governor has provided a blueprint that not only moves forward important biomedical research, but that creates jobs and economic expansion as well. The question we should be asking is not whether we can afford to do this, but rather whether we can afford not to.

Charles Hoslet is managing director of the Office of Corporate Relations at UW-Madison.

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