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Helping Draper Expand Here Is State Money Well Spent

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 28, 2008

Tax money given as an incentive to a private business to create jobs raises the question of how taxpayers at large will benefit from the deal.

Most of us, for example, aren't qualified for any of the 165 jobs Draper Laboratory plans to create in Tampa and St. Petersburg. But the expansion of the celebrated lab here is in many ways a success more important than winning a Super Bowl or a World Series.

Football isn't rocket science, but Draper is. Baseball won't cure cancer, but Draper is working on it.

It is a big boost to local pride that Draper isn't coming just because of the $20 million or so in incentives, the biggest piece provided by the state Innovation Incentive Fund. The independent laboratory at the edge of the MIT campus in Cambridge is expanding here largely because this area has the talent pool it needs to work on solving some of the world's toughest scientific problems, say Draper scientists.

Its labs here will need scientists and researchers and also machine operators and testers, with pay averaging $75,000 a year. The business and academic climate here is good for attracting companies that can build on a commercial scale the products Draper invents.

Credit for bringing Draper here is shared among USF, the governor's office, the Tampa Bay Partnership, SRI-St. Petersburg and local governments, including Hillsborough County and Pinellas County.

The nonprofit lab concentrates on four areas: security, health, energy and education. This area is a good fit for each.

In security and defense work, Draper will be near the headquarters of Central Command and Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, as well as near the Port of Tampa and not far from the Kennedy Space Center.

Draper's technology guided the Apollo moon missions and enables missiles fired from submarines to hit distant targets. It is working on surveillance aircraft the size of a schoolboy's paper airplane and maybe smaller.

"We can make things really, really small," a Draper researcher told us.

How small? "Machines one-quarter of an inch long," he said. "Others so small you can't see them."

On health issues, Draper scientists plan to work with USF, the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital, and the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center.

The small machines and computer chips Draper makes can be useful to doctors as well as soldiers. Some of their most exciting work is with implantable machines that can deliver drugs internally, in small doses, directly to the spot needed, reducing or eliminating side-effects.

While the work is expensive, the results promise lower cost diagnosis and cures for people worldwide. Among the many projects on the drawing board is a breath sensor to detect TB.

In energy, one current project uses concepts Draper perfected in designing sensors for the space shuttle and the harsh environment of space. Working with Progress Energy, Draper soon will be putting sensors inside the combustion chambers of coal-fueled power plants so operators can adjust the mix for optimal burning. Len Polizzotto of Draper tells us the real-time information can improve efficiency 10 percent, which will lower electric bills and reduce emissions.

In education, Draper will use some USF graduate students in its work, among other things. Maybe one will some day write a doctoral thesis on how the lab found a cancer cure, or how it steered a spaceship to Mars.

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