We worked on passing, Joey and me – put the ball in his lap, and encouraged him to push it, which he did. Not every time, but you could see him working it out. He hears, “push it, Joey, pass the ball.” His brain processes this and tries to signal his arms. After a bunch of tries, the message gets through, like restricted mail. And he shoves the ball. Nice pass.

We did this for about an hour while most of the other Heroes went through drills that Joey can’t participate in – yet. I’m through with absolutes. In fact, that should probably be the 11^th Commandment – there are no absolutes. So, I won’t say he can’t participate. I’ll add the “yet,” because as we know, there are some things that just don’t occur on demand. And we’ve got Barry, so all bets are off.

Every Saturday, Barry and our various assistant coaches volunteer their time to ensure that a group of often marginalized kids (and young adults) experience the thrill and pleasure of playing sports. For many of these kids, there is elation in the simple act of shooting free throws. Between them, there is encouragement and sharing and cheering and unwavering support. These are mostly fearless young people who know, without a doubt, that they are the good guys. It’s a beautiful, real thing, a microcosm of how It could be.

So many of my peers, adults in various stages of advanced oxidation, live and act out of fear, clinging desperately to gray, familiar, faulty patterns of judgment. The ‘Different Others,’ regardless of what’s different about them, are offensive, to be avoided, overcome, removed, eliminated. Cut, don’t create. Hunker down, don’t extend. Remove, don’t sustain. Raze, don’t raise. It’s fear. You want compassion and empathy? Look somewhere else. Look in the YMCA gym on a Saturday morning.

You’ll see Cooper, Craig, Josiah, Mary, Tim, Robbie – Robbie who always says hello, who asks if you saw that shot, who always says see you later, because he really wants to see you later. You’ll see C.J. using her one strong arm to shoot free throws. And now, thanks to the compassion and empathy that inflates this place, that flows in spades through Barry Vandiver, Joey isn’t merely working on passing. He’s shooting baskets with is best pal Cooper.

Couple of weeks ago, while Joey and I were working on passing, Barry sidles up and says, “I’m gonna come up with something that lets Joey shoot baskets.” And I remember thinking, “catapult.” Spent a little time looking at different catapult designs in the ensuing week, but by the next Saturday, Barry had already built it. PVC pipe, a spring, a few pieces of hardware and a cord that Joey could pull (with help and encouragement, because again, it takes time for the message, “pull!”, goes from his brain to his arm). And now my son is sending basketballs flying at a kid-sized hoop.

Barry has been our friend since Joey started going to school with his son, Cooper, and they soon started playing Heroes sports together. Cooper, Joey and their pal Chris were the Three Amigos. They still are, but Chris is another school, now, so they can’t get in as much trouble together as they used to. So, it wasn’t a surprise when we showed up last Saturday and Barry showed us the basketball catapult (and yes, we will use it to toss snakes into the air), because Barry has done this before.

A few years back, he built a lift/transport device to move Chris around his elementary school classroom. He installed a device in a school commode for another student, so she would know when … uh … everything was coming out OK. He has made things most of us take for granted refreshingly accessible to young people that have few choices. Helping teachers move a growing child from one part of the classroom to another, helping a youngster take care of business in the bathroom, helping a little guy shoot basketballs, and Lord knows what else, because Barry doesn’t advertise.

He seems incapable of hearing the word, “can’t.” He figures what is needed to make something happen, then builds it. It’s because he’s a talented guy loaded with ingenuity, but mostly, I think, it’s because he has a tremendous heart. Bottom line, Barry Vandiver is a great father and family man, a guy who gives of his time and energy to serve on the local school board, a guy who has invested heart and soul in the wellbeing of these kids, the Heroes. Basically, he’s a guy who should be cloned. He’s the kind of dad that makes other dads want to do better, and another example of why my family feels ridiculously lucky to be living in this neighborhood of the world.

Goofus was always doing bad shit, like shooting the bird with his slingshot, and Gallant was the good kid who dives in front of Gallant’s slingshot to take a rock for the bird, or Goofus would break the lamp and hide the evidence while Gallant breaks the lamp and sells a kidney so he could pay for the damage, that kind of ham-fisted good vs. evil malarkey.

Even as a kid I mocked the cartoon, and mistrusted both Goofus and Gallant for their extremist points of view. But as I got older, I began to see the value of the cartoon, for the way the characters clearly (and bluntly) demonstrated for a young audience the basics in how to play nice – and how not to – on a crowded planet.

So I began to see Goofus less as a victim of his obvious impoverished upbringing, and more as a scheming, self-centered lout whose id had run amok, and saw Gallant as less of a smug, holier-than-thou middle class asshole with a saint complex and more as a guy sincerely trying to do the responsible thing.

As usual, the truth is somewhere in between: both are assholes, and I’ve made it my life’s work (for the last 30 minutes or so) to prove it. Meet the real-life boys – now they’re old men – who served as the inspirations for Goofus and Gallant:

Frank “Goofus” Klinghoeffer, 75, is a retired police officer (several departments) living in Phoenix, Arizona. A self-professed “thug turned cop,” Klinghoeffer was suspended five times in his career for police brutality, most notably during the 1968 Democratic Convention, when he shoved a bouquet of roses up a protestor’s anal cavity and said, in front of national news cameras, “now, whenever you fart it’ll smell like peace, ya stinkin’ hippy.” Ironically, Klinghoeffer was decorated for valor by the Birmingham Police Department for similar actions during Civil Rights demonstrations there.

Klinghoeffer spends his time these days collecting stamps, raising gamecocks and most recently, working on a play.

“It’s a musical comedy set during the Nuremberg Rally,” he says. “It’s sort of a companion piece to the Sound of Music. Sort of.”

Billy “Gallant” Purcell, also 75, lives in Boca Raton, Florida. A retired dentist from New Jersey, Purcell actually turned to a life of crime as a young man.

“I robbed a few liquor stores is all, because I needed the money to pay for my mother’s breast enhancement surgery and I’d already given a kidney to pay for the lamp, so, you know … I figured the law would never suspect Gallant. Guess I was wrong,” says Purcell, who was released from prison after three years for good behavior, and worked his way through dental school as a female impersonator at an Atlantic City nightclub.

“I think the pressure of trying to stay like Gallant just got to be a little overwhelming,” says Purcell, a Born-Again-and-Again-and-Yet-Again Christian who spends his weekends on street corners in small towns “marketing” on behalf of the Westboro Baptist Church.

“I learned long ago that I don’t have to concern myself with living up to that impossible standard,” Purcell says. “Instead, I can abuse and harshly judge others who can’t live up to that standard, either, with my offensive signs and bat-shit behavior, so life is good. Life is good.”

Next week, the Timbertoes: Pa’s woody prompts Ma to say, “is that your twig in my hollow, or are you just happy to seed me?”

And honestly, I’m thankful most days without dressing my gratitude up in cranberry sauce and gravy.

But this week, this holiday week, began in a way that left my family and I feeling … resentful, maybe? Hatetful? Abandoned and lower than whale shit? Anything but thankful.

Our son’s nurse – we’ll call her Lurlene to protect the guilty – walked off the job after almost three years. Let me correct that. ‘Walk off the job’ implies more courage and decency than this woman showed us. She skulked off the job, scuttled off, crept off, slunk off, snuck off – shuffled off in whatever way you do in the darkness under a desk.

She came twice a week, Wednesdays and Thursdays usually, and spent about six hours with our son each day, looking after his basic needs (the state program that paid for her services requires that there be an education component to her service – we were the ones doing all the educating, because she couldn’t even take his temperature at first; it took her two years to learn how to put on the knee braces he sleeps in).

But when someone immerses herself in your life, comes into your home several days a week, shares meals and secrets with you, takes care of your child, a thing happens. You overlook the stupid shit, and a relationship develops. You become friends. You know each other’s good stuff and bad stuff, weaknesses and strengths, needs and desires, problems and challenges, all of the things you know about a friend, and over the last few years we cultivated and nurtured something that felt — to my family, anyway — like a friendship.

We exchanged gifts on holidays, became Facebook friends with her grown children, cooked her meals twice a week, laughed and cried together (well, I personally didn’t cry with her, but my wife listened to her share personal things, love life stuff that usually requires an hourly fee to say).

She came into our lives because of a state program but we had no doubt that when the program inevitably ended, or when we were kicked out of it in the annual government sanctioned slashing of social aid, that we’d remain close with Lurlene.

Turns out that we were the really stupid ones. Turns out government-subsidized friendships don’t count.

The phone call came early on Monday. “Lurlene won’t be coming back to take care of Joey,” the office lackey said. “She doesn’t want to make that drive any more.”

It was a 35-40 minute drive to our house from hers.

“We’re trying to find you another nurse,” he said.

But I was still processing the first thing he’d said and fumbled for words, “uh, she couldn’t call us herself?”

“She asked us to call,” he said, and repeated, “We’re trying to find you another nurse.”

Lurlene didn’t have it in her to call, she didn’t have whatever courage, class, human decency it takes to call or text or send an email or do anything else that would have raised us above the microbial level of contractual obligation. When she left last Thursday, she left knowing she wouldn’t be back. She hugged my wife and said see ya later, knowing full well (probably) that her next move was to slink away without notice.

She got a better gig with the same company, closer to her home, more hours. If she’d had the minimum of decency required to tell us this, we would have wished her well, we would have said, “oh, we hate to lose you, but good luck – when should we meet for dinner?”

Instead, she erased that, erased everything between us and blithely moved onto the next thing. My son’s love and affection for her was real – unlike Lurlene, he is incapable of faking these things – and in the cover of darkness, in her secret fear, she wadded up whatever he was to her and threw it away, burned it, and with bulging, hungry eyes reached for the next shiny thing.

The wife and I were stunned, then numb, then really pissed off, and now philosophical. Lurlene, we realized, has no sense of direction, that this is whole affair is just the latest in a long series of wrong turns for her. I get no joy at all from the fact that it will continue to go badly for her, to know that karma is a heartless bitch.

So what are we thankful for today? Everything. Thankful to have been born, to have lived, to have found each other, to have a roof without leaks (and the good sense to fix it when it does leak), thankful to have family and true friends, for their companionship (and this week especially, for their food).

I’m thankful for my son, thankful for his honest love, thankful even that he loves Lurlene; thankful that he constantly teaches me, thankful that he sees the soul in people who can’t find it in themselves. His trust in a mixed up, inconsistent human race sometimes gives me pause, but ultimately gives me hope, and every day I’m thankful for that hope, that glimmer, that attainable grace.

I know that he served in the Air Force, he was a medic who hated heights but somehow overcame it while jumping out of helicopters into hot zones (to hear Jane tell it). My own feeling is, he was one of the many brave people who did one of the most frightening things imaginable – temporarily sacrificed his personal freedom by putting his life in the hands of government employees and going to war.

Suffice to say, Mario is a very good man who I’m proud to call a brother – in-law or otherwise. I’ve never heard him refer to himself as a patriot. He is spiritual by nature, and definitely hasn’t been a war hawk. He has two great kids, grandkids, lives in California, doesn’t travel very far, so our personal visits have been few and far between.

The other day he called to wish Jane a happy birthday, and as so often happens, he ended up talking with me – what the hell, Jane wasn’t home, so we talked. Mario asked me what I was working on, as he almost always does. At the time, I was writing a story about Bill Bolling, another Vietnam vet who served in the Air Force. Mario seemed captivated.

I told him that Bill had started (and continues to manage) the Atlanta Community Food Bank, that Bill’s commitment to serving a disadvantaged population was motivated decades ago, in large part, by his realization that so many of the homeless people he served were fellow Vietnam veterans – former brothers in arms, as it were.

Bill worked on navigation systems on C-130s that often came under enemy fire in flight, and after fulfilling his four-year commitment became an anti-war activist and embarked on a personal spiritual journey. The thought of a Bill Bolling at war is almost incomprehensible because he is one of the most peaceful souls you’re likely to meet. The same might be said of Mario.

Bill has made it his life’s mission to feed the hungry, and to an extent, house the homeless, and generally improve the lot of humanity on a large scale – the food bank Bill started has inspired the addition of other food banks around the state, and has fed millions of hungry people since opening for business more than 30 years ago.

Mario, who also is actively involved in feeding the hungry through his volunteer work in the Sacramento area, was genuinely impressed and glad I was doing the story.

“We need to read more stories about true heroes,” he said. I think he said it twice. And he used the word “heroes” not to describe a professional athlete or a general or a movie star or politician, but a guy who is trying to eliminate hunger, a guy who is – proudly – a community organizer.

I agree with Mario, Bill Bolling is a genuine hero. And though my brother-in-law wouldn’t claim it for himself, he’s one too. So, per Mario’s suggestion, you’ve just read a story about true heroes.

The Atlanta Community Food Bank and its partners around the state and nation need your heroic efforts. Visit feedingamerica.org to link up with the organizations doing good work in your area. This is the time of year when most food drives happen because the holiday season tends to bring out the most goodwill, and that’s a beautiful thing. But the greatest need for food is actually during the summer, when children are out of school – a very large number of students (about 85 percent) on the free/reduced meals program at school are food insecure during the summer break. So, volunteer or donate when you can.

The laws of common sense apply, or try to apply, at something like the Harvest Music Festival. The security people, for example, were about as level-headed a group as you’d expect under these circumstances – patient, attentive for the most part, with more than 5,000 people (many of them drunk and/or stoned) to look after. It’s a ridiculous task for anyone.

One security woman told me they were less worried about marijuana than they were about alcohol – “no one gets into trouble with marijuana, but some people get really ugly when they’ve been drinking.” We didn’t get into the nitrous oxide discussion.

There always is a sense of community at these things, friendships made within tent cities and among RV campers, and usually pretty much everyone behaves, adhering to the “live and let live and love they neighbor” rule book. This festival community was so well behaved that Yonder Mountain String Band’s frontman/mandolin player Jeff Austin told the crowd during Saturday night’s mainstage finale, “thank you for taking care of each other.”

But it was impossible not to be surrounded by people on different planes of semi-consciousness. Still, I didn’t see any out-of-hand shenanigans. Even the one gun-shaped object that I know I saw (an RV camper) was probably just a smoking implement.

The most dangerous weapons at the festival? Flailing elbows — people waving their arms as they danced, doing the ‘chase-the-bees-from-my-head’ and other patented moves that grew out of the Deadhead repertoire. And even then, people were looking out for each other – heard a lot of “sorry dude,” when someone ran into me while dancing. No harm, no foul, we’re just sharing space.

•••

Got to see Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, which is only three people, but they’re not little people. Josh (The Reverend) Peyton has a beard and look that reminds you of Popeye’s arch-enemy, Bluto.

He makes a lot of faces and gestures on stage while playing boisterous, balls-to-the-wall country blues, and his wife Breezy is very animated on the washboard, and the dummer, Aaron “Cuz” Persinger has a bucket filled with drumming stuff.

They are a colorful trio, to say the least, demanding of your attention. Reverend cajoles and insists that the audience participate, suggesting, “raise your fists in the air, people always sing better with their fists in the air. It’s a scientific fact, there have been studies.”

•••

Friday night at camp: It was around 3 a.m. Zach, Jimmy and I had been talking for a few minutes and were headed to our respective holes for the night, Zach and me had tents, Jimmy was sleeping in the car, except he locked his keys in the car, in the ignition, with the radio on, sucking on the battery.

Zach went to one of our neighboring campers, some punk-hippy hybrids, to borrow a coat hangar.

It took three of us to unlock the damn thing. Zach and I took turns with the flashlight, while the other tried to pry open the rubber door lining and Jimmy finagled first one hangar, then another (because he dropped the first one inside the car). This is one of those lock buttons built into the door panel, so Jimmy the contortionist had to distort the hangars in multiple ways before finally finding the one-in-a-thousand leverage point.

Got to sleep around 4. Awake by 9-ish, I was drawn to the mainstage with just a handful of other zombies by the sound of a banjo being played the way no other banjo has been played – it was Bela Fleck and the Flecktones doing a sound-check for that night’s show.

More later.

It’s Saturday night, 12:30 central time on top of the Ozarks and I am sitting in a camp chair with my computer on the bed of my truck, a sun-bright street lamp 100 yards away washing out what would otherwise be a sky filled with stars, the Yonder Mountain String Band playing half a mile away. They are perfectly loud from here, another jaw dropping, awed-out jam, string musicians taking their instruments to new places, creating gusts in your face with music. The sensation of riding a train up and down steep hills and around sharp curves through some green sonicsphere has been constant.

The Harvest Festival weekend is just about over for me. Tomorrow my daughter Sam, her significant other Eric and I are leaving, headed back toward Little Rock.

There was something like 70 bands here. I only fully saw about a dozen of them, heard some others, saw a bunch of old hippies, neo-hippies, weekend-hippies (“It’s Monday, Bob, leave the clip-on ponytail at home.”), hipster writers, rednecks, punks.

There are four stages, and you can hear everything from this campsite. I heard and saw a lot in two days, some of it might even be worth sharing.

•••

Made it all the way to Cass, Arkansas, two miles from the venue (Mulberry Mountain), about 650 miles from home, before being pulled over by the law, which is amazing because I drive an old truck with suspicious bumper stickers and a speedometer that doesn’t work, and I’ve run a lot of cop gauntlets between Georgia and Arkansas, so my inner speedometer must work pretty well.

Drove like a boy scout, made sure to use my turn signals, wore my seat belt. Wore it until Cass, anyway, when I took it off to reach for something in the glove compartment. Fifteen seconds later, there was the cop, his blue lights swirling, his siren whooping.

Guy gave me a lecture on safety, went back to his car with my insurance card and driver’s license and sat there for what seemed like a drum solo, or longer. Came back and said, “sir, here’s what I’m gonna do for you. I’m gonna let you go with a warning. But here’s something you probably didn’t know. This license is expired.”

He’s right, I didn’t know, I’d totally forgotten and was genuinely embarrassed, so I let him off with a warning, “buddy, don’t turn 50 any time soon.”

•••

Waited until nightfall to pitch my tent. Hit the dust running at Mulberry Mountain and was just too busy seeing the Emmitt-Nershi Band, Split Lip Rayfield, Railroad Earth, interviewing Yonder Mountain String Band (the official hosts of this festival), Drew Emmitt and Bill Nershi, to bother myself with sleeping arrangements.

So when you camp, you go through a red-shirt security detail that asks, “do you have any weapons, fireworks or glass containers?” Doesn’t matter how you answer, because they search your stuff anyway. Sort of (during the weekend, I saw many fireworks, at least one gun, and a couple of mason jars with clear liquid). Anyway, they didn’t find the six-pack of beer buried at the bottom of my cooler, beneath the benign yogurt and juice containers.

I pull into my camping space around 9:30 that night and met my neighbors. There was Grant, Spencer and David on one side. Very nice guys, Grant bought a bag of ice that he let me have when mine had evaporated.

On the other side was Zach, who is 19 and from somewhere in south Arkansas.

Zach tried sneaking his friend Jimmy, also 19, into the festival. Jimmy hid in one of those Rubbermaid tubs, the kind you might use for your recyclables at home. Somehow, this kid contorted himself into the tub. He really wanted to see this festival, and he really didn’t want to pay.

Our heroes were just about through the checkpoint when one of the security guys decided he needed to check through the tub in the backseat. He poked through one side and somehow didn’t find anything. He decided to go back for another look, opened the lid on the other side and felt Jimmy’s head. Guy said (in my imagination, in a war movie German accent), “nice try, I admire the effort, but you’ll have to sneak in some other way.”

Jimmy did. It involved a hike through the woods in the dark, but when he broke through into the venue, the first thing his little penlight found was a $20 bill lying in the grass, primo ground score. I think I want Jimmy to manage my financial affairs, if I ever have some.

•••

Random thought: If there is no cheering in the press box for sportswriters, does that mean there is no dancing in the photo pit for music writers? More later.

In the universe we actually live in, biotechnology is a lot less cinematic but it can be equally dramatic – as a pathway to healing the sick, feeding the hungry, enlightening scholars and lining pockets. Really deep pockets.

Biotech and life sciences in Georgia – companies, academic research and development, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – contribute an estimated $22.9 billion in sales, $9.9 billion in state GDP and $627 million in tax revenues for state and local governments.

In moviemaking parlance, that’s what you’d call a blockbuster, and there are a lot of people suckling on this cash cow: in Georgia, 35,000 direct jobs, 105,000 total jobs, $6.2 billion in personal earnings.

“This is really encouraging because it represents a significant increase in economic impact, at a time when the economy is in the tank,” says Charlie Craig, president of Georgia Bio. “This is a recession resistant industry.”

Those boffo numbers, based on 2009 figures, come from Shaping Infinity, an industry impact report produced by Georgia Bio and the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.

It’s the first Shaping Infinity study in two years, and it shows the industry’s largest impact so far, but much of that is because this time around the CDC’s influence was included in the overall tally. Of course, the study’s author believes the overall numbers are encouraging no matter how they’re divvied up.

“At a time when statewide employment shrunk – and this has been the worst economic stretch I’ve seen in my lifetime – biotech and life sciences actually grew through the recession,” says Jeff Humphreys, director of the Selig Center, which conducted the study. “Biotechnology and life sciences is a growth industry. It’s pervasive in its impact.

“Information technology, the digitalization of the world, was the last big thing. Life sciences and biotech, to me, is the next big thing. I think it will do more to power global, U.S. and Georgia economic growth than information technology did.”

Life sciences companies alone accounted for about 18,000 direct jobs (supporting 75,000 in total) and $19.5 billion in sales and $4.4 billion in earnings in 2009, with an average salary of $64,000, well above the statewide average ($42,000) for all industries.

From 2007 through 2009, as statewide unemployment rose by almost 7 percent, jobs in biotech and life sciences grew by 1.3 percent and the number of firms grew by 14 percent. Surgical instrument manufacturers, medical labs and blood/organ banks account for the highest growth areas, while pharmaceutical manufacturing – the largest employment sector in the industry – showed the most losses.

Here’s what those economic impact figures don’t reflect.

Atlanta-based pharma firm Sciele, purchased by Japanese company Shionogi (for $1.4 billion in 2008), last year moved its Atlanta operations to New Jersey, taking some jobs north in the process.

Another Georgia firm, Solvay (whose U.S. pharmaceuticals unit was based in Marietta) was sold early last year to Abbott Laborator-ies for $6.2 billion. That resulted in the shuttering of the Marietta facility. There went about 400 jobs.

Apparently, that real estate won’t be vacant for long. In April, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported that global pharmaceutical company Osmotica would create about 160 jobs at a 150,000-square-foot facility planned for the old Solvay site, a $30-million investment. Gov. Nathan Deal confirmed Osmotica’s plans in August.

Place to Be

Ed Schutter had a ringside seat at Solvay and Sciele.

A longtime executive with Solvay, he was president and COO at Sciele during its Shionogi transition, then he left. Last year he led a group of investors in the purchase of a small pediatric-focused company in Raleigh, N.C. Arbor Pharmaceuticals had about 15 employees with annual sales of roughly $3 million when it was bought in April 2010.

“Since then we’ve done five deals and really added to the product lines, and we’ll do about $120 million in sales this year,” says Schutter, who moved the company to Atlanta last November. The company now has about 30 employees in Georgia and more than 150 nationwide.

Arbor won Georgia Bio “deal of the year” honors in January for completing $34.8 million in financing in November, the largest private-financing bio-deal last year in Georgia. Arbor’s founding investors include Jason Wild of JW Asset Management of New York (like Schutter, he is a pharmacist by training) and Dr. Alan Chao, founder and former CEO of Watson Pharmaceuticals.

“We’ve got a committed group of investors,” Schutter says. “From the start, they’ve been willing to put the money out to acquire some marketed products, some opportunities early on to get us off the ground.”

For example, the company, previously focused exclusively on pediatric medicine, now counts a nitroglycerin pump spray (Nitrolingual, to treat angina) as a flagship product. The company works with more than a dozen partners around the world in licensing, manufacturing or developing marketed and late-stage pipeline products.

Arbor added some R&D (research and development) muscle last fall when Dr. Laurence Downey, fomer CEO of Solvay, joined the company as VP of medical affairs.

“It’s not like we had to train the leadership of this company when we put it together,” Schutter says. “Also, we’re in the right place. Atlanta is a great transportation hub, and we travel every day.

“There’s a lot of talent that resides here, and science centers, the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Emory, Morehouse [School of Medicine], the CDC.”

Those things – transportation hub, brainpower – helped draw Dendreon to Atlanta in 2009, when the Seattle-based firm announced it would build a $70-million plant in Union City to make its landmark prostate cancer immunotherapy Provenge.

The drug is actually a vaccine that trains a patient’s immune system to fight existing tumors, and the studies that prompted FDA approval showed Provenge extends survival four months longer than conventional chemotherapy, with fewer side effects.

Not surprisingly, it’s really expensive – $93,000 covers the necessary three treatments. In spite of the cost, hopes among corporate executives, shareholders and patients were soaring as the drug went to market.

Then the company issued a disastrous second-quarter financial report in August, and its stock plummeted overnight. Provenge sales were no-where near Dendreon’s lofty expectations ($350 million-$400 million a year), prompting job cuts and class-action lawsuits on behalf of reeling shareholders who claim they were misled by the executive leadership.

Though Dendreon chose not to comment for this article – on the potential for other applications of Provenge, its stock plunge, its future in Atlanta, or anything – one thing is clear: The science is sound.

“This wasn’t a science issue, it was all about reimbursement – doctors hesitant to prescribe it because they’re afraid they won’t be reimbursed because it’s so expensive,” notes Alex Harvey, an early-stage entrepreneur who has been paying attention, because he could learn some things from Dendreon’s example.

With Provenge, cells are harvested from patients, shipped to a facility like the one in Atlanta for “training,” then shipped back and injected into the patient.

“We want the same end result – an immunotherapy with a survival benefit. We don’t want the logistical issues and the high cost of treatment,” says Harvey, who is acting as CEO for Viamune, a company that just incorporated a few months ago with the goal of commercializing a breast cancer vaccine from technology developed at the University of Georgia’s Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC) in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic.

Harvey, who was the leading researcher at another UGA startup, AviGenics, became familiar with the CCRC’s breakthroughs through his wife, Therese Buskas, who was the cancer vaccine coordinator for Dr. Geert-Jan Boons’ research team there. Dr. Buskas lost her own battle with a rare form of cancer last year. The sad irony of her loss, her work, and what it was for remains a personal and emotional subject for Harvey.

“I am sure it has hard for the others, too,” he says. “It was a huge loss on many levels. But we work hard at staying objective and focused on the science and the goal of getting this to patients.”

Jump Starter

Viamune is still in the larval stage, but it got a developmental jumpstart this summer when it was named one of the 10 semifinalists in the annual BIO/Plan competition conducted by Southeast BIO (similar sort of mission as Georgia Bio, with a broader regional focus). Five of the 10 are from Georgia.

The competition targets technology transfer offices and entrepreneurs from research universities and centers in the Southeast. Semifinalists are paired with mentoring teams comprising professionals with relevant start-up experience. All semifinalists, whether they advance to the “final four” or not, walk away from the process with a development strategy.

“We’re provided a team of experienced business people – lawyers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists,” Harvey says. “It’s a great opportunity to get some expert advice and input at no cost.”

DiagNano is one of the other semifinalists from Georgia, but this is a company that was actually formed five years ago as a TI:GER project – a competitive collaborative program between the Georgia Tech College of Management and Emory Law School focused on commercializing research.

Since then, DiagNano has been involved in a number of business plan competitions as it continues to seek funding for further development of its quantum dot cancer diagnostics tools.

These competitions, says DiagNano CEO and co-founder Brad Kairdolf, “are helping us mold our business plan to address some of the issues we don’t have any expertise in, to get us to the next stage, to get that first round of funding.”

Kairdolf, who recently completed his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering in a joint program at Tech and Emory, developed the company’s core technology with Georgia Tech researcher Dr. Shuming Nie. Basically, they developed a nanoparticle surface coating that allows quantum dots (and other metal nanoparticles) to give off vibrant colors and be used to identify cancer cells in tissue biopsies.

“We want to give pathologists the tools they need to do what they do best,” says Kairdolf, who has applied through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a million-dollar grant to keep the process moving toward commercialization. “The next step is looking for angels and VCs. This technology doesn’t require as much money as drug development, so we might be able to get further downstream with less.”

DiagNano did get some seed grant money from the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). But then the GRA has been playing an essential role in the development of tech start-ups and university-based research projects for 20 years.

Since its launch in 1990, the GRA has turned $525 million in state funding into $2.6 billion of additional federal and private investment. Now that it has been brought under the organizational umbrella of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, GRA’s role in bringing public and private entities is likely to grow.

The alliance remains an independent, nonprofit corporation, says GRA President Mike Cassidy, who adds, “Our role has expanded, adding capacity to our ability to build on the output of Georgia’s research universities and medical schools to grow companies and strategic industries.

“With our closer interaction with the Department of Economic Development, we will be able to expand industry-university collaborations.”

As part of the cost-saving reorganization, the Georgia Cancer Coalition (GCC, which was originally spun out of the GRA) and Centers of Innovation have become GRA charges, meaning more responsibility for Cassidy and his small staff (eight people at last count).

Eminently Hopeful

One of GRA’s most successful efforts through the years has been the Eminent Scholar program. More than 60 of these expert researchers and educators have been recruited to Georgia’s universities. The most recent is Scott Jackson, who left Purdue University to join University of Georgia scientists in mapping the peanut genome.

“From an economic and social perspective, having a fundamental understanding of all the genes that make a peanut a peanut – or make any crop whatever it is – allows us to engineer those plants, and that leads to better yields, more resilience, better composition,” says Jackson, who previously mapped the soybean genome and is one of the leaders of the international Peanut Genome Initiative, which includes a number of UGA scientists.

“I was drawn to UGA’s emphasis on plant biology, breeding and genetics,” Jackson says. “But ultimately it came down to the colleagues there and our overlapping interests.”

About 100 miles from Athens, another GRA Eminent Scholar is one of the leaders of a project that brings together the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory, auto manufacturer Toyota, specialty glass manufacturer Mo-Sci Corpor-ation and Georgia Health Sciences University.

In June, the research team won notoriety as a winner of the R&D 100 award, given by R&D Magazine, which annually recognizes the 100 most technologically significant products.

The porous-walled hollow glass microspheres the researchers developed can be used for storage and handling of hydrogen gas in hydrogen-based vehicles (thus, Toyota’s involvement). They might also be used as controlled-release drug delivery systems and MRI contrast agents. That’s where GHSU’s Dr. Bill Dynan (the Eminent Scholar) comes in.

“Savannah River approached us with this material that is really unique; there’s nothing quite like it,” Dynan says. “It’s sort of like micro-scale glass balloons that have a very thin, very strong wall surrounding a hollow central cavity. The original intention was for handling the nasty materials the DOE works with.”

A network of interconnected pores allows the microspheres to be filled with, hold and release gases and other materials, making them a potentially ideal method of handling, storing or transporting a variety of materials – that includes handling, storing and ultimately transporting medicine into human bodies.

Dynan envisions microspheres enter-ing tumors to fight cancer at the source; he imagines a better transportation system for new drug therapies.

“What we’d really like to do is apply this technology to a class of pharmaceutical molecules that might show promise, but there are no methods of delivering them,” Dynan says. “This would be an enabling technology.”

So Carl Clark, GHSU’s director of technology transfer (and economic development), has been getting the word out to potential biomedical industry partners.

“These hollow microspheres are one of the hottest products I’ve seen in a long time,” Clark says. “This can be an important mechanism in relief for AIDS patients’ delivery of antibiotics over a long period of time. I met with a company from Denmark interested in a product for delivery of allergens.”

Before joining GHSU almost three years ago, Clark spent 15 years in technology licensing and business development in the corporate environment.

“My focus was linking up with the GHSUs of the world, seeing who was inventing what, and what could be commercialized,” says Clark, who ac-tively sought the opportunity to work on the other side, as the guy trying to get the inventions in front of the investors.

“I guarantee if you have good technologies you will see success breeding success. The plan to get there is pretty clear here at GHSU – you bring in more researchers, more Eminent Scholars, and you’ll have some breakthroughs that catch the attention of the rest of the world.

“Success will breed success.”

What I want is to bounce ideas off her, I want to read her latest Headwaters thoughts and scribblings and experience the soul-satisfying and ego-fulfilling exercise of answering her when she says, “So tell me Jerrygorilla, what do you think?” Because even though she was stubborn as hell, she really wanted to know.

I want her to tell me more about chaos and creativity, and I want to explore that concept with her, and I want to keep working with her on the One Voice that we consciously and subconsciously wrote with in our rare and fruitful collaboration (and if you want to know the whole truth, it was mostly me consciously trying to keep up and write as closely to Jo’s singular voice as my limited skills would allow).

But my friend is gone. My teacher and collaborator and fellow deadline-challenged partner in mischief is gone.

So I’ll never feel the close, powerful hugs her small body gave at every greeting and parting, and I’ll never get to talk with her in my loud outdoors voice (because she couldn’t hear worth a shit). No more text messaging and emails with Jo, whose name always brightened my inbox, even if what she said pissed me off.

I hear her voice like a shadow in my head, professorial adages and advice, strong opinions and admonitions, soaring encouragement and affirmation, honest and useful criticism, commiseration, and stories. But the sound of her voice, that is gone.

And though I am suddenly profoundly sad, there also is a little anger – anger over the human condition, probably, at the inevitability that the longer we live, the more loved ones we lose. I’m angry with the damn Grim Reaper.

Jo wrote, after coming pretty close to joining the choir invisible some months back, “I shook hands with the Grim Reaper, made choices, cut a deal… Like the Grim Reaper actually honors such deals, but you make them anyway, you have to, you are human with an investment in this life. The only way around such deal making is to die by surprise, and I’m not so sure you get out of it even then. You just do it a whole lot faster.”

I am forever grateful that Jo made the investment.

I’m grateful, too, for Jo’s dear friends Al, Lisa, Carleen, etc., etc., etc. (I don’t know all of them by name, but I know they stayed close to Jo and took care of her these past weeks). Thinking of them makes me appreciate (even more) my friends Nance and Jill, and anyone else who cares for and comforts the dying. Because of all these angels, the wait for that backstage pass to the universe is made with grace and light.

And I am honored and humbled to have had Jo as my colleague, to be able to say, “I was Jo Carson’s co-writer.” She kind of tried to beat the journalist out of me when it came to writing plays, and told me something about the craft that I’ll never forget. She said, “we can make up stuff if we get the truth of it right.”

Several weeks ago I had the tremendous good fortune to spend a few last hours with Jo over the course of a few days, and even then – let’s just say it: from her deathbed – she held court magnificently, bouncing stories around, then perfecting them in the telling (the great storyteller, her timing, inflection, delivery consistently improving with each telling to each new visitor, the sort of thing one does with an eye toward a future, whatever and however long that future may be).

She told me about some amazing dreams she’d been having. She always had the best detailed memory of dreams of anyone I’ve known, and I hope that she’ll visit mine.

But at one point she told me, “I made a bad deal and now I wish I could renegotiate.” See, for years Jo took care of her mother, who was dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and she basically said to the universe, “anything but that for me.”

It’s the word “anything,” that the Grim Reaper, or the Great Arbiter, Grand Timekeeper, God (or whatever calls the shots and keeps close tabs on the expiration date written in our DNA’s fine print) latched onto.

“Anything” can be anything. In Jo’s case, it was cancer and it was too soon, especially for a brilliant soul who was … um … challenged by deadlines. I only knew Jo for five or six years and from the start wished that she’d entered my life sooner. But she was so worth the wait.

How the hell was I to know that the rest of my life was knocking on the front door? It was probably 8 a.m., and I was fast asleep. But Jane kept knocking.

Our family dog, Whiskey, was about 14 and tired. She limped into the foyer, looked at the young woman peeking through the window, and went back to her spot in the kitchen to lie down.

Jane knocked again. My sister Tonette woke up this time, answered the door and came upstairs to tell me, “get up, there’s a girl looking for you downstairs.” She said it like the word “girl” should be in italics, as if this sort of thing didn’t happen to me.

But this was something I half expected. The plan was, Jane would pick me up and we’d meet the gang at the train station. Except, there wasn’t a gang. Unbeknownst to me, Jane called everyone and told them to stay the hell away, probably in that tone. She wanted it to be just the two of us. The others could find their own way.

See, this surprised me because she was dating another guy at the time. Her infidelity was an immediate turn-on.

We drove to Deer Park and picked up the train and tooled around the city for a while, walked by the Dakota to see where John Lennon had been shot, walked past the guys selling loose joints, found a spot in a field that we thought would give us a good look at the stage and were absorbed by half a million people.

Simon and Garfunkel opened with Mrs. Robinson. We walked around Central Park for half the concert, looking at the tiny musicians on the stage half a mile away, saw a guy dangling from a limb in an oak tree, and a cop trying to talk him down; ran from a bunch of guys that Jane called “assholes” when one of them bumped her, stayed for the whole show and walked some more.

Did a lot of walking that weekend, peeled each other’s minds back. Never uttered the words “soul mate,” though. Way too soon.

We spent the night in her friend Jackie’s dorm at NYU and I called in sick to work at the bowling alley the next day, a Sunday. She bought me a shirt at some basement store. The shirt has long since been eaten by moths and time, but Jane and I are still together, in spite of many odds.

So this is an anniversary of a first date that wasn’t supposed to be a date, and I’m a romantic by nature, but I’ll pull a Fred Flintstone tonight and go where I was supposed to be 30 years ago on that Sunday morning-after. I’ll go to the bowling alley.

Hey, my team needs me. And Wilma will understand.

When I told him how much I enjoyed seeing him play in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium when we were both about 35 years younger, he said, without a shred of pretension, “Well, thanks. Hope I didn’t disappoint you.”

Disappoint? The guy was a baseball virtuoso, consistent as the sunrise.

For nearly a quarter century Aaron was a cool customer who rarely showed emotion, whose athletic elegance, intense focus and passion to succeed was masked by his seeming tranquility – to some observers he looked as likely to take a nap in the batter’s box as he was to massacre a baseball, which he did with savage regularity.

He hit 755 home runs in a normal-sized (i.e., steroid free) human body. He won a Most Valuable Player Award and a World Series championship and stared down an onslaught of hate mail while staring down Major League pitchers en route to breaking baseball’s most hallowed record.

I saw some of his home runs, in person. Got his autograph.

When the Braves traded him to the Milwaukee Brewers, it pissed me off. He was 41, near the end, but I always hoped he’d finish his career in a Braves uniform. Instead, he ended his career in the city where he started it, breezed into the Hall of Fame, worked in the Braves front office, started a successful business empire and a philanthropic foundation, settled gracefully into his role as an elder statesman of the game, and into the collective American mindset as one of the greatest players of all-time.

“No,” I told him, “you didn’t disappoint me.”

Aaron was a quiet superstar radiating organic poise. He never sought the spotlight, though it eventually found him. But just in case anyone was watching, he always made being Hank Aaron a full-time job.

“You have to carry your dignity a little bit further than the field, you know,” Aaron said, as if this is common knowledge. “Just because you’ve taken the uniform off doesn’t mean you stop being a professional. You try to live your life and play the game in such a way that others would want to emulate.”

When it came to emulating someone else, Aaron aimed high. He was a young teen living in Mobile, Alabama, when he first saw Jackie Robinson play in an exhibition game, and remembers evenings spent with friends and family around the radio whenever Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers were on the air.

“Here was the first African-American in the big leagues, someone the black community could really look up to,” Aaron says. “And he really set the example for all the black players who came along of what it takes to be a professional athlete – beyond hitting home runs and base hits. It wasn’t in what he said, but the way he carried himself.

“You start idolizing someone, you watch their every move. He didn’t have to say anything to me. Good thing, because I was in awe. I probably would have been paralyzed.”

Aaron’s playing career might best be viewed from a distance, from the vantage point of years. He didn’t hit moon shots like Mickey Mantle, didn’t lose his hat running down fly balls like Willie Mays – basically, he didn’t play in New York, so he wasn’t appreciated on a national level like those guys.

He wasn’t flashy, but he was rock solid and relentless, more durable than Mantle or Mays. He also hit for a higher average than they did, collected more hits, may have been their equal as a fielder, was a brilliant baserunner, drove in more runs than anyone who ever played, and on April 8, 1974, did what many considered impossible, passing Babe Ruth as the all-time home run leader when he belted No. 715 in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

So, given all of that and everything else the guy has seen and done, maybe it’s understandable that he would forget that one episode of Futurama. Yes, Hank Aaron actually was a guest voice on Futurama, in an episode called A Leela of Her Own.

It’s a mostly awful episode in which one-eyed Planet Express captain Leela breaks the gender barrier in ‘bernsball,’ and calls on Aaron’s descendant, Hank Aaron XXIV, to help her along. Aaron provided the voice for both his progeny and his own preserved head. Anyway, his performance (he acts like you’d expect a retired ballplayer to act) makes the otherwise terrible episode memorable … memorable to anyone except Hank Aaron.

“Futurama? What is that?” he asked me.

I was stunned, because I couldn’t wait to ask him about Futurama. I tried to explain.

“No, I honestly don’t remember doing it,” he said. And he wasn’t being aloof. He either blocked the experience out of his mind, or he just didn’t remember.

The guy had a photographic memory and could tell you what kind of pitch Don Drysdale threw on a 1-2 count in the late innings of a mid-summer game in 1962, he could remember which way he broke for a fly ball in deep right field when he took an extra base hit from some poor schmuck on the other team. But he couldn’t remember his few minutes of animated TV fame in 2002.

And that’s another reason why I love Hank Aaron. The man’s got his priorities in order.