L. Zane Shuck

Born 10-23-1936, in Bluefield, WV, he grew up on a 183-acre farm (divided by the Bluestone River) that had been in the family for over 100 years, and his Great Grandfather, Irving H. Bailey, and Grandfather Grover C. Wright farmed it for a living. L. Zane Shuck lived across the River on a tract of land granted to his parents from his Grandfather Wright. In addition to hunting and fishing, he earned spending money by trapping mink, muskrat, and raccoons and selling their pelts. In perspective, he grew up as a child working with his father who could make or repair about anything including watches and clocks and carpentry like beautiful gun stalks, and working for his grandfather in spare time in his blacksmith shop making and repairing any tools needed on the farm. Thus, he inherited the pleasure of making things, whether in a welding or machine shop, electrical repair, carpentry shop, or later in a high-tech research lab. Over the years as an engineer, in addition to inventing and making advanced instrumentation devices, such as hydrophones, pressure transducers, et. al., he engaged in such interesting projects as designing and building, with help of one bulldozer contractor and a couple of helpers and using prestressed concrete beams, a 92’ single span bridge across Bluestone River that divided his 183-acre farm (see picture). He also leveled floors in a downtown 5-story building with 3 helpers by jacking the 30’ wide by 90’ long building up 5-1/2” at the rooftop level from the basement and first floor inside the building using 8” x 8” x 30’ long steel WF beams, and using only two small 6” dia. x 8” high, 10,000 psi hydraulic jacks and two hand pumps in about 3 weeks. In addition, after retiring, he has enjoyed buying old houses and renovating them from foundation to roof and adding miscellaneous innovative architectural features. As part of his satisfaction in designing and making things, and as a hobby in his spare time, he also has made a variety of pottery pieces for friends and was asked to enter one in a tri-state competition, which actually won the grand prize at the contest. (see picture) He hopes to return to this hobby soon.

In his early years he attended Mercer County, WV schools in Rock, Princeton, Bluefield and Matoaka. Upon graduation from Matoaka High School in 1954, his parents, Carl O. Shuck and Notre Dame Shuck, enrolled him in West Virginia Institute of Technology in Montgomery, WV where he spent 4 years and received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1958. He launched his engineering career at West Virginia Armature Co. in Bluefield, WV, as a sales and design engineer immediately upon receiving his BSME degree. A year later though he accepted an offer to return to West Virginia Institute of Technology as an Instructor. He pursued every opportunity to further his education including 3 NSF graduate scholarships, 4 Ford Foundation fellowships, and special summer programs at Iowa State University, Wayne State University, and 4 summer programs at MIT, and along the way received his MSME degree from WVU in 1965. He was rapidly promoted in steps to Associate Professor and Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department. In 1966 he was awarded Sabbatical Leave to pursue a Ph. D. at WVU, and then he returned to Tech through 1967. He then returned under a NSF scholarship to WVU in 1968 as a National Science Foundation Science Faculty Fellow and Research Engineer in biomechanics and researched human brain tissue rheological properties for his Ph.D. dissertation, and whereupon he received a Ph. D. from WVU in 1970, and his first U. S. patent on a dynamic piezoelectric transducer. He also received an award from WVU for it being the first patent ever issued through WVU.

Meanwhile, during pursuit of his MSME and Ph. D., he passed State exams and became a Registered Professional Engineer in WV and Ohio and became certified by the National Council of Engineering Examiners. During this time, he also consulted with several companies, starting with surveying properties and staking the locations for new oil and gas wells. One very interesting job involved him as chief stress analysis consultant for FMC-Dow Chemical Co. in analyzing and redesigning a totally new design unit train of all aluminum welded construction with underneath clam doors the full length of the hopper cars that opened while slowly moving to unload granular cargo. During prototype testing, the train failed the required 5 mile/hour impact into a solid stone wall test, when the clam doors on bottom of the cars came open and dumped the loads. With Dr. Shuck’s structural analysis and redesign modifications, the hopper cars passed the tests. During this time Dr. Shuck also consulted for the United Fuel Gas Co., the WV Southern Public Service Co., the Studebaker Corp, and the West Virginia Air Pollution Control Commission.

Then in 1970 to 1976, he served as a Supervisory Mechanical Engineer and Projects Leader in oil and gas extraction technology at the Morgantown Energy Research Center (MERC) of the US Department of Energy, where he received 17 more patents in only six years, and a U. S. Department of Energy Award for obtaining the most patents (7) in one year than any other federal government employee ever throughout history. He was active in advancing hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling, and underground coal gasification technologies, characterizing the Upper Devonian Shales, setting up the first computer center at the MERC, and many hydraulic fracturing laboratory and field projects and technology transfer associated with his research activities. During this period, he was also an Adjunct Professor at WVU. 

In 1976, Dr. Shuck accepted an academic administrative position as Professor of Mechanical Engineering and equivalent Associate Dean for Research, in the WVU College of Engineering until 1980, when he founded his own R & D company, Technology Development Inc, to respond to the booming oil and gas industry. He then ended up drilling and completing 65 oil and gas wells, mostly in the Upper Devonian Shales, which he had previously researched and helped develop various extraction technologies for, at the U. S. Dept. of Energy Morgantown Energy Research Center in the early 70s. When the gas price crashed in the late 1980s, he stopped accepting investments from friends and others, and retired from drilling wells, but not from advancing technologies of interest to him.

Around 2010, he learned he was “gluten sensitive” and encountered a temporary, but severe, memory loss until he went totally 100% gluten free. After about 3 months of being totally gluten free along with antibiotics, his memory slowly returned, and in a year, even better than it had been for many years. This entire episode, and associating it with family history and their health issues, totally occupied his attention and curiosity. Picking up from his background in biomechanics 35 years ago, and as an avid researcher, especially in modeling and research methodology, he aggressively pursued an understanding of gut mechanisms and processes in general, and the so-called “gluten sensitivity” umbrella term in medical profession for many symptoms and diseases. This entailed crash courses in microbiology, gastroenterology, digestive processes, human gut anatomy, molecular biology, and numerous other related topics covered in medical curricula. This was about the time when the NIH human microbiome studies were beginning, but the human gut microbiome was seldom, if at all, mentioned then in the literature. After over a year of controlled diet research experiments during 2010-11, on his own body and with all the data and observations, he created several hypotheses, which led to a U. S. patent application, and after a couple of years review resulted in a patent award dated July 23, 2013. But this was only the beginning of Dr. Shuck’s GI tract research. He started creating “An Engineer’s Model of the Human Gut”, but it finally dawned upon him that there are not only 3,000 or so largely unknown microbial strains/species (variables), each with at least one byproduct variable (6,000 total minimal variables), but transient, cascade variables and processes all along the 28’ or so of the GI tract. This “Engineer’s Model of the Gut” project was put on hold until tons more of information become available, which then resulted in 4 more patents, that constitutes his new human healthcare system based in the GI tract, which is under development. At minimum, there are over 6,000 partial differential equations with variable coefficients that are functions of functionals that must be solved simultaneously. Given sufficient data, such as can be provided by the 5-patent system, these solutions become tractable.

During this same 2010 era, the oil and gas extraction technology Dr. Shuck had worked on in the 1970s matured and directional drilling became successful for 10,000’ horizontal laterals or more for Marcellus Shale wells. The evolved directional drilling capability was the enabling technology, not any new hydraulic fracturing technology as often reported. The hydraulic fracturing technology developed for vertical wells, that was simply applied with brute force to long horizontal laterals drilled through the reservoir and intersecting the natural vertical fractures (NVFs) with an average 10’ spacing intersecting the wellbore, created irreversible devastating problems. As Dr. Shuck discovered, during cementing 10,000’ of horizontal pipe or more 7,500’ deep, the high cement hydrostatic combined with pumping pressures are sufficient to penetrate the NVFs, and hydraulically frac the shale with cement, thereby cocooning and reducing the world’s energy supplies of original oil and gas in place by as much as 50% forever. This is evidenced by 80% decline in gas wells in two years and only 20% instead of the normal 65% original gas in place being recovered. Dr. Shuck has invented processes to solve this problem. However, due to the huge number of wells being drilled that created the gas glut and low prices in spite of the devastating low recovery efficiency, the tragedy has been masqueraded, and with the current low gas prices, demonstration of his invented technology must wait. However, he believes the mask will soon come off! Thus, Dr. Shuck has refocused his research interests onto this monumental dilemma since the same reservoir cocooning technology is used all around the world by the same companies, even today. 

So, this partially explains why Dr. Shuck is engaged in researching, perhaps, the two most diverse, complex, and challenging disciplines possible, involving the human gut microbiome with way over 6,000 undefined, uncharacterized variables, and oil and gas extraction processes 7,500’ deep with10,000’ to 20,000’ long laterals through the shales. What problems and disciplines could be more different, or for that matter, more difficult? With his 5-patent gut research and patient treatment system, and 16 patents and more applications pending now in oil and gas extraction technology, he has created the foundations upon which successful technologies in both fields can evolve, and appear eminent.

In summary, Dr. Shuck’s professional career has evolved to help advance state-of-the-art of two very important, diverse disciplines: 1) human gastrointestinal tract microbe strains and species roles that contribute to 34 symptoms in various combinations, and are hypothesized to actually be the causative mechanisms in up to 53 major human specific diseases, and 2) inventing less expensive and higher recovery efficiency oil and gas extraction processes (patents pending). In the more than six decades of his career, Dr. Shuck has remained busy as an engineer, educator and researcher. His achievements include being the first to hypothesize the discrete jump nature of fracture growth in such materials as sandstones, limestone, and shales during hydraulic fracturing and experimentally proved it in the laboratory, and was the first to analyze and predict the 3-dimensional stress distribution in the Earth’s crust during hydraulic fracturing and demonstrate the feasibility of re-orienting the Earth’s stress field sufficiently to control the orientation of new induced fractures. Furthermore, his research resulted in the discovery of criteria required for altering in situ stress fields to change propagating fracture orientation. Using microseismic emission mapping techniques and a special 12- hydrophone array system he designed, built and deployed 2,000’ deep in the Bradford 3^rd sand in Bradford, PA, he mapped for the first time the orientation of hydraulically induced vertical fractures propagating during a mini hydraulic fracturing experiment in Bradford, PA in 1974-75. As part of this and other research he wrote the scripts and produced 3 technical films for the U. S. Department of Energy.

Dr. Shuck is also known for discovering and hypothesizing important roles the human microbiome roles play in symptoms and diseases, including temporary memory loss from which he experienced severely for about 3 months and then after about a year recovered better than previous 30 years, and GI tract issues from which he also over a period of 5 or more years satisfactorily recovered. He has several hypothesized theories pertaining to gut microbiome roles in “gluten sensitivities” and other diseases in the neurological and gastrointestinal systems, such as, autism, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Crohn’s, IBS, Alopecia, and other nutrient-deficient, autoimmune system, and inflammatory-based diseases, for which he is preparing mathematical and physiological models and manuscripts. Dr. Shuck believes the human brain and GI tract, which are in constant communication, are the two most complex and sophisticated systems to model on earth, and many diseases are coupled to both systems. Since medical physicians can only treat the symptoms of diseases because the causes, except for a couple, remain unknown, cures of diseases are not possible. The Dr. Shuck 5-patent gut healthcare system is specifically designed not only as a patient treatment tool, but as a fundamental research tool to discover causative mechanisms involving microbes and their processes, and from which 1,000’s of evolutionary research projects can emerge in most disciplines of major human diseases. Determining the actual causative mechanism of any one major disease for the first time in human history would be a success of transformative proportions.  

Dr. Shuck has authored 57 publications, given 18 invited national lectures, organized 10 national professional conferences, written scripts and produced 3 technical films for the U.S. Department of Energy, received 20 U.S. Patents, and served on 5 master’s degree thesis, and 8 doctoral dissertation committees in mechanical engineering, and served as Science Advisor to then WV Governor Jay Rockefeller. He is the recipient of several awards, including 1^st patent issued through WVU, a Ralph James National Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a U.S. Department of Energy Award for “Most Patents Awarded in One Year (7) Ever by a Federal Government Employee” and a Materials Testing Award from the American Society for Testing and Materials, and Who’s Who Top Research Scientist and Engineer. In addition, West Virginia University honored Dr. Shuck in 2016 by the naming a laboratory in recognition of his work. The “L. Zane Shuck Nanobiotechnology Laboratory” was established on the engineering campus in Morgantown in 2016.

Philosophically, as a research scientist and engineer, “He remains mesmerized by all the simultaneously acting in symphony manifestations of all the laws of nature (variables) every second in our lives, while some create model functions with only one or two variables; the epitome of myopia!  Whether for diseases with a minimum of 6,000+ variables, or climate change, billions of research dollars spent per year are for naught, while coincidence reins for all.

LIFE BEYOND CAREER

He is blessed to have a wonderful daughter, Kirsten Berman, MD. and son-in-law Ari Berman, MD., who gave him 3 wonderful, creative and innovative grandchildren, Isabel, Gabriel, and Matthew Carl, and have his wonderful 40-year companion Linda Stalnaker, who has accompanied him on his eventful journey.  It is also great to have a very capable business partner, protege since 13 years old, and friend like Lee M. Lewis, now pursuing his Ph. D., to help implement innovations, and a diligent 30-year property manager like Emanuel Billiris to respond when duty calls. 

CONTACT:   [email protected]       304-288-0919