I spent all day Tuesday at a government sponsored “economic and education summit” that heralded the need for more higly skilled employees in the workforce to make our nation more competitive.
Scientific skills in particular are in demand we’re told - and people to convey the wonder of science to our children.
Then, ironically, I ran across this article on how one home based highly skilled business is in hot water with the locals. I guess they just don’t care that this type of business is “the future” of our nation’s economy.
From the Anchorage Daily News
RADIOACTIVE: Owner wants to make isotopes to be used for locating cancers.
For years, Al Swank quietly operated a business that included research on radioactive medical tracers, out of his two homes along the Delaney Park Strip. Then he put a business sign up.
Soon, city officials began investigating possible zoning violations and some neighbors started raising questions about his work with radioactive substances.
Swank wants to produce from his house the radioactive material that is injected into cancer patients to locate cancers. The material, a radioactive isotope, is used in conjunction with PET Scanners, a technology available in Alaska only since 2003.
The isotopes are attached to a form of sugar that heads for cancer sites. The radioactive material makes the sites stand out in the images.
Now the isotopes are flown in from Seattle, which is tricky because they decay and lose their usefulness in a matter of hours.
“I feel there is absolutely a need for somebody to make isotopes in Anchorage,” said Dr. Chakri Inampudi, medical director of Providence Imaging Center. Providence Imaging owns one of two PET Scanners in the state. PET stands for positron emission tomography.
Alaska Open Imaging owns the other and is happy with its Outside supplier, said its medical director, Dr. Robert Bridges.
Swank, 55, lives in South Addition in a pale blue house his father, Al Swank Sr., built in the 1940s, and another adjacent house the younger Swank bought later.
If not for the business sign and a couple of unusual tanks outside one of the houses, Swank’s property would fit snugly into its surroundings, an old Anchorage neighborhood with small houses and well-mannered lawns.
The sign, sitting above a brown picket fence and next to the sidewalk, announces Swank’s enterprises: Langdon Engineering, and Alaska Physics Engineering Laboratory.
Swank works as a regular civil engineer. For example, he said, he was the engineer of record for rehabilitation of the McKay Building.
He is also a consultant nationally and internationally on cyclotrons, the machines used to make isotopes. These are circular accelerators that generate radiation but have safety shields built around them.
Swank has been building the devices since he first began winning science fairs for physics projects as a West High School student in the late 1960s.
By the middle of 2006, he plans to be operating a used cyclotron from Johns Hopkins University, and beginning local production of medical isotopes.
“Most people don’t know anything about it,” said Kathy Weeks, president of the South Addition Community Council and one of Swank’s neighbors. “I don’t think anyone in an R2M zone (multifamily residential) thinks that’s going on next door.”
She put the topic on the council agenda for discussion.
Some neighbors said they just want to know more about it.
“Radioactive anything being manufactured in the neighborhood makes me concerned until I am given a lot more information,” said Ruth Moulton.
“If someone can run a business out of a house that doesn’t interfere with the neighborhood, I’m not going to get excited,” said Yale Metzger, who lives a block away. “If it’s dangerous, I will get excited.”
The city zoning conflicts appear to have become a side issue, having to do with specific rules on running a business from a home. The business sign can’t be where it is and is too large, a zoning officer wrote to Swank. Also, the officer said Swank couldn’t operate the business out of an adjoining house, and that his main house, a triplex, is on a lot too small for a triplex.
Swank said he has grandfather rights to the triplex and has come to terms with the city on just about all its concerns, except for the sign size and placement.
He particularly wants to improve the tools for cancer diagnosis here because his father suffered from multiple cancers, he said.
Besides providing local isotopes for PET scans, Swank said he wants to increase educational opportunities for middle and high school kids and university students. His science fair achievements in the 1960s included a fourth place at the 1967 international science fair in San Francisco and opened doors at NASA and other national research facilities to him.
He’d like students in Anchorage to be able to walk into a scientific lab and gets hands-on experience, he said.
It just goes to show, Mr. Swank, your neighbors would have been much happier had you devoted your time to chain letters! We’re proud of you though!
No comments yet.