From Gas Wells to the Human Gut: L. Zane Shuck Applies Six Decades of Engineering to Two Very Different Problems

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. L. Zane Shuck grew up on a 183 acre farm cut in two by the Bluestone River, land his family had worked for more than a century. As a boy he hunted, fished and trapped, and he spent long hours beside a father who could build or repair almost anything. He has said that is where the engineering began. More than 60 years later, the founder of Technology Development Inc. is still building things, and his inventions now reach from deep shale wells to the inside of the human digestive tract.

His formal training came from West Virginia schools. Dr. Shuck earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from West Virginia Institute of Technology in 1958, a master's degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University in 1965 and a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics and biomechanics from WVU in 1970. Fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation took him to graduate programs at Iowa State University and Wayne State University and to four summer programs at MIT.

From 1970 to 1976 he was a supervisory mechanical engineer and projects leader at the Morgantown Energy Research Center of the U.S. Department of Energy. He worked on hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling and underground coal gasification and on characterizing the Upper Devonian shales. He received 17 patents in six years there, and in 1975 the department honored him for earning more patents in a single year than any other federal employee. He also wrote and produced three technical films for the agency.

In 1980, after several years as a professor and research administrator at WVU, he founded Technology Development Inc. to serve a booming oil and gas industry. The company went on to drill and complete more than 65 oil and gas wells, most of them in the same Upper Devonian shales he had studied for the government.

He still writes about that field. Dr. Shuck argues that the shale boom of the 2010s was made possible by advances in directional drilling, which allowed horizontal laterals of 10,000 feet or more, rather than by new fracturing methods. He also contends that current practice in the Marcellus and Utica shales recovers only about 20 percent of the gas in place and that much higher recovery should be possible. He has continued to file patent applications aimed at lower cost, higher recovery extraction.

Around 2010, a personal health episode turned his attention to a completely different system: the human gut. Drawing on his early work in biomechanics and his long experience in modeling and research methods, he began designing tools that could measure what happens along the full length of the digestive tract instead of relying on samples collected at the end of it.

The result is a set of five patents for swallowable capsule devices. US 8,491,495, granted on July 23, 2013, covers a system for collecting gut microbes and their byproducts along the entire tract. US 8,915,863, granted on December 23, 2014, is a research tool that can release substances at a chosen point and time and measure the response. US 8,926,526, granted on January 6, 2015, is a diagnostic and treatment tool that sends data by telemetry to a monitoring system. US 9,215,997 followed on December 22, 2015, and US 9,955,922, granted on May 1, 2018, addresses the roles individual microbe strains play in diseases that start in the gut.

Dr. Shuck is careful about how he presents the medical side. He describes many of his ideas about the gut microbiome as hypotheses grounded in published research but not yet tested experimentally by him, and he notes that the capsule system is still under development. His aim is a research and patient care platform that could reduce the need for invasive procedures.

Public service has been a constant. He served as science advisor to West Virginia Governor Jay Rockefeller and as science and technology coordinator for the West Virginia Legislature in 1979. He spent 16 years on the engineering advisory committees of WVU and WVU Tech, served on state commissions for coal and energy and for air pollution control, and in 1998 founded the Appalachian Rivers Conference and Exhibit. He has led The WMAC Foundation, a nonprofit, since 1997.

His record includes 62 publications and 23 U.S. patents, among them the first patent ever issued through WVU. He received a materials testing award from the American Society for Testing and Materials in 1970 and the Ralph James Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1980. WVU named the L. Zane Shuck Nanobiotechnology Laboratory in his honor in 2016 and admitted him as an Alum Emeritus in 2022. He is a registered professional engineer in West Virginia and Ohio.

Dynamo Times recognizes L. Zane Shuck for more than six decades of invention and public service and for the curiosity that carried an energy engineer into research on human health.