Caption: Making way for the Marcellus, Credit: Reid R. Frazier/Allegheny Front
Image by: Reid R. Frazier/Allegheny Front 
Making way for the Marcellus 

Gas Money flowing into Universities

Series: Breaking the Land: Marcellus Shale and the Gas Age
From: Reid Frazier
Length: 00:07:06

Gas companies spend millions of dollars to fund research at Penn State. Does the money buy anything else? Read the full description.

Forest_landscape_small There's a gas rush on in Pennsyvlania. There's also a rush to study the risks and rewards of the Marcellus shale. Some of that research is paid for by the very corporations extracting the gas. Should public universities do research that benefits corporations? The Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier went to Penn State, one of the biggest corporate funded research schools in the country, to see what research Marcellus shale drillers were funding. 

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Piece Description

There's a gas rush on in Pennsyvlania. There's also a rush to study the risks and rewards of the Marcellus shale. Some of that research is paid for by the very corporations extracting the gas. Should public universities do research that benefits corporations? The Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier went to Penn State, one of the biggest corporate funded research schools in the country, to see what research Marcellus shale drillers were funding. 

Transcript

There's a gas rush going on in Pennsyvlania. There's also a rush to study the risks and rewards of the Marcellus shale. Some of that research is paid for by the very corporations extracting the gas. Should public universities do research that benefits corporations?
As the Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier found out, corporate cash can help researchers, but some wonder whether the public is really being served.

FRAZIER: $103 million dollars. That's how much Penn State gets from big corporations to fund research every year. Only Duke, Ohio State and MIT get more research dollars from industry. The money pays for work in everything from computer science to nanotechnology to Marcellus shale.

KOHL: So this is the core lab, we've got almost 6,000 feet of core over here I think, I'm not quite sure what the last number is.

FRAZIER: Dan Kohl is a graduate student in Penn State's Department of G...
Read the full transcript