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National Safety Council Confers Borkenstein Award on IACT's Own Patrick Harding

International Association for Chemical Testing Newsletter
IACT Newsletter - Volume 18, Number 3
August 2007
By Shirley Ezelle

This article provides the transcription of Dr. Kurt Dubowski's speech honoring WSLH Toxicology Supervisor Patrick Harding with the 2007 Robert F. Borkenstein Award in March 2007.

The National Safety Council’s Highway Traffic Safety Division and the Committee on Alcohol and Other Drugs presented the 2007 Borkenstein award to Patrick Harding at a banquet in San Antonio, TX , February 19, 2007. The event was held in conjunction with the annual conference of the American Academy for Forensic Sciences. Dr. Kurt M. Dubowski, Ph.D., DABCC, DABFT, introduced the recipient to the attendees. A transcript of the presentation follows.

“We have gathered on this festive occasion to celebrate the conferral by the National Safety Council Highway Traffic Safety Division of its 2007 Robert F. Borkenstein Award upon our colleague Patrick M. Harding. They could not have selected a more worthy recipient as the sixteenth Laureate of the premier North American peer recognition in the field of alcohol, drugs and traffic safety.

It is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce my colleague and friend Pat here tonight; and to recite some of his background, achievements, attainments and contributions that have brought him to the top of our profession.
 With today’s award, Pat becomes the only person to be a dual Laureate of the National Safety Council Robert F. Borkenstein Award and the International Association for Chemical Testing Kurt M. Dubowski Award, which he received in 2005.

[As one of only three persons who are Dubowski Award Laureates, Pat pointed out to me that the one commonality among these three persons (Natalie Essary, Shirley Ezelle, and Pat Harding) is that each has pierced ears.]

The dual peer-recognition awards do illustrate splendidly the high regard his professional colleagues have for Pat, on the basis of his achievements and contributions to our field.

Much in the pattern of Professor Robert F. Borkenstein’s own career, Pat Harding’s professional activities in the field of alcohol, drugs and traffic safety have encompassed the research, practice, teaching, administration, and expert witness testimony aspects of the field, in a spectacularly successful career now spanning 30 years.

Pat’s personal background is fascinating, and explains much about his cosmopolitan persona and outlook. He was born in 1952 in Port Hueneme, CA, a Navy Seabee base, where his father – a career U. S. Navy member – was then stationed. Prior to his dad’s retirement from the Navy in 1966, the family also lived in Van Nuys, CA, Washington, DC, Kenitra, Morocco, and Napa, CA. In 1966, Pat’s family moved to Lafayette, LA, which he and others consider his true hometown. His mother’s family of French-speaking Cajuns is from Lafayette. They lived on land that was part of his grandfather’s farm, next to the home – a Creole-raised plantation house – where his mother and her six siblings were born and raised. The old house is now a National Registered Historic Property, the Sidney Martin House, dating to 1825. No wonder Pat’s e-mail name is “bayouboy.”

He began his higher education at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, and then migrated to Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he received his B.S. in Biochemistry in December 1975. Pat has supplemented that first class academic education with much additional professional training in pharmacology, toxicology, and related subjects; and especially comprehensive training and continuing education in the field of alcohol and drug-impaired driving and their forensic science aspects.

Pat became a Research Assistant at Bjorksten Research Laboratories in Madison, WI in 1974 while he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Bjorksten Research Laboratories was then and still is one of the country’s foremost independent chemical research organizations, active in research, development, and engineering activities on a contract basis. Its clients include U. S. government agencies, trade associations and commercial organizations. He continued working at Bjorksten as a Chemist until 1977; and those three years in a varied and challenging research-and-development environment were a perfect prelude to his subsequent public service career at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene from 1977 until the present time.

The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, WSLH, established 103 years ago, modestly describes itself as “the state’s public and environmental health laboratory.”  It is that and much, much more. WSLH is considered by many, myself included, as one of the foremost public health laboratories in the world - if not the foremost - with highly diverse programs and activities related to public and environmental health and public safety. Operating under the control of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, WSLH is fully integrated into the University’s educational, research, service and outreach programs and has pioneered many of the services it and other public health and clinical laboratories now perform worldwide.

At WSLH, Pat served successively as Chemist 1977-2001, Breath Testing Specialist 1982-present, Alcohol Programs Coordinator 1991-2001, Legal Alcohol Proficiency Testing Coordinator 1990-2001, and Toxicology Section Supervisor since 2001 to the present. In those several positions, he has performed administration of clinical and forensic laboratory programs, carried out clinical and forensic analyses for alcohol and other substances on biological specimens; provided research and scientific support for Wisconsin’s breath-alcohol testing program; provided expert court testimony and interpretation of blood and breath-alcohol test results as well as those on other drugs which impair driving; performed training and given seminars and presentations related to alcohol and drug testing; and, of course, directed and supervised other staff in these functions. That listing reads like a civil service job description and is, in part, Pat’s own abstract of his current position. Like WSLH’s description of what it is and does, Pat’s listing does not begin to tell the enormity of his career impact on our field, nor the sustained excellence of his personal contributions.

Let me cite one example from personal knowledge. When WSLH first developed its pioneering blood and urine alcohol proficiency testing programs several decades ago, my toxicology laboratory at the University of Oklahoma was asked to serve as one of their charter external referee laboratories for that P/T program. The human blood-alcohol P/T specimens that were prepared monthly by Pat himself and under his direction for more than a decade were so exquisitely stable and well characterized that we employed them in our laboratory as blood-alcohol controls, often as long as a year after receipt, for our own quality assurance activities and in our functions as an external blood-alcohol reference laboratory for the National Bureau of Standards, USPHS Centers for Disease Control, and the blood-alcohol P/T programs of such states as CA, FL, NY, PA, OK and the nationwide Blood-Alcohol Survey Programs of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry/College of American Pathologists. That is just one example of the excellence and outreach scope of Pat’s personal daily work at WSLH.

Pat’s professional activities have included extensive expert witness testimony on alcohol-related evidence in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and New Jersey. One of those trial appearances was in the 1990 New Jersey Downie case, the most extensively litigated U. S. trial on Breathalyzer™ issues, in which Pat was one of the ten expert witnesses from the U. S., Canada, United Kingdom, and Sweden. As a sidelight, and illustrative of Pat’s inquisitive mind, he decided to compare the several experts’ contributions to Downie, and did so by weighing their respective testimony transcripts. [Modesty prevents my revealing whose testimony was the most weighty; although the New Jersey Superior Court in its opinion was not so constrained.]  Most recently, Pat was again one of the several state’s expert witnesses in the State of New Jersey vs. Jane Chun, et al. litigation currently pending before the New Jersey Supreme Court on the issue of replacing the Breathalyzer™ with the Draeger Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C as their new evidential breath-alcohol analyzer. Indeed, trial appearances and expert testimony have been among Pat’s most visible, continuing, and successful professional efforts over the years, with about 500 DUI/OWI trial appearances to date.

Research has been an important part of Pat’s professional work throughout his career. Three of his major studies were published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences:  “Breathalyzer Accuracy in Actual Law Enforcement Practice:  A Comparison of Blood and Breath-Alcohol Results in Wisconsin Drivers,” in 1987; “Field Performance of the Intoxilyzer 5000:  A Comparison of Blood and Breath-Alcohol Results in Wisconsin Drivers,” in 1990;  and “The Effect of Dentures and Denture Adhesives on Mouth Alcohol Retention,” in 1992. He was also heavily involved in the IACT-NHTSA Research Project on breath-alcohol instrumentation 1993-96. His other professional publications include the main chapter on breath-alcohol analysis in the leading treatise on “MEDICAL LEGAL ASPECTS OF ALCOHOL” edited by James Garriott, 2003; and the comprehensive chapter on “Interpretation of Alcohol Results” in the July 2003 monograph “ALCOHOL TOXICOLOGY FOR PROSECUTORS” published by the American Prosecutors Research Institute.

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s dictum “You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” is splendidly reflected in Pat’s career. Not only has Pat been a mentor and a role model to several generations of WSLH staff members over the years, but he has generously shared his wisdom, insight, knowledge, and experience with thousands of other professionals in forensic science, law enforcement, coroners, prosecutors, the judiciary, and related fields through a continuous series of presentations from the 1980s to the present. A typical example is his keynote presentations on “Alcohol Toxicology” at the National District Attorneys Association Seminar on “Lethal Weapon – Homicide DUI,”  given annually at the National Advocacy Center. Pat is also a stalwart member of the visiting faculty of the Robert F. Borkenstein Course on Alcohol and Highway Safety at Indiana University/Bloomington – arguably the country’s foremost postgraduate training program in forensic alcohol toxicology, celebrating in 2007 its Golden Jubilee marking 50 continuous years of presentation of the Borkenstein Course.

Pat has further multiplied his impact on and contributions to forensic toxicology in general, and alcohol and drug-impaired driving in particular, through his active membership in the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, The Society of Forensic Toxicologists (SOFT), the Midwest Association for Toxicology and Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, and especially the National Safety Council’s Committee on Alcohol and Other Drugs, and IACT. Pat’s work with those last two organizations deserves special mention. The National Safety Council’s Committee on Alcohol and Other Drugs, established in 1935 and continuously active to the present, is universally regarded as the senior scientific body in the field of alcohol and drugs in relation to transportation safety. Its positions, policies, pronouncements, and recommendations have often become the law of the land, have been incorporated into the Uniform Vehicle Code, and are frequently cited by both sides and the courts in impaired driving litigation. Pat has been a voting member of CAOD since 1987, has served on the Committee’s Executive Board since 1995, and co-chaired with Kurt Dubowski its Subcommittee on Alcohol Technology, Pharmacology and Toxicology 1995-99. He was Vice Chair of the Committee and its Executive Board 2000-2001, and served as Chair of both bodies 2001-2004. Now, as Past Chair, his name resides among those of such esteemed CAOD Chairs as Bob Borkenstein, Bob Forney, Sr., J. D. Chastain, Lowell Van Berkom, Bob Zettl, and the most recent - Shirley Ezelle. During his term as Chair, a particularly noteworthy accomplishment was to gain from the National Safety Council, for the first time ever, substantial independence and freedom of action for the Committee, greatly enhancing and expediting is efforts, while at the same time promoting its effective interaction with the National Safety Council and its Highway Traffic Safety Division. As Chair, he also promoted and emphasized attention to drug-impaired driving issues, resulting in several national and international symposia which have greatly expanded our knowledge of and attention to this problem area, and resulted in a highly productive emphasis which continues today.

Pat’s contributions to IACT are similarly long-term and outstanding. He was a founding member of IACT and has been a Regular (Full) Member since 1988. He is one of only a few, if not the only, member to have attended each Annual Meeting. He chaired IACT’s Publications Committee for eleven years 1990-2001, was Editor of the IACT NEWSLETTER for ten years 1990-2000, and has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2000, as well as a frequent contributor to IACT’s annual meeting programs.

The foregoing recitations are but a sampling of Pat Harding’s career-long outstanding contributions to traffic safety, and the alcohol and drug-impaired driving arena in particular, which have inscribed him in the all-time Roster of Greats in the field. His work and achievements have added further luster to the world-class status of his career home, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene and the University of Wisconsin. They serve as a beacon of the accomplishments of a dedicated forensic scientist.

But Pat Harding, the man, is so much more than an accomplished and renowned scientist and administrator. He is a warm and cherished friend to many, and a very complete human being. His sense of humor is boundless. Pat and his charming wife Grace share a passion for travel well beyond attending University of Wisconsin away football games. Pat’s other hobbies are model railroading (since boyhood), photography, and sports. Their cat “Gris-Gris” (as in the New Orleans term for Voodoo) rounds out the family.

You have now heard something about Pat’s background, his career, some of his attainments and contributions to our field, and the man himself. And, of course, his work, contributions and achievements continue. Thus, by every measure, our colleague, Patrick M. Harding has fully earned his recognition today as the National Safety Council’s 2007 Robert F. Borkenstein Laureate.”

“Congratulations, Pat, and every good wish for the future.”

Pat has indeed been extremely important to IACT as well. I count Pat among a list of friends who have inspired me professionally and personally. One of my claims to fame is that I was the one who appointed Pat to be the IACT publications chair and Newsletter editor. Pat’s warmth and strength of character add to his personal charm. Congratulations, Pat, from IACT and me too.

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Please Note: This article is an electronic clipping from the International Association for Chemical Testing Newsletter from August 2007. It is reprinted here with permission from the IACT.

Related Stories:

• Harding Receives National Toxicology Award from Peers
• On The Road & Reaching Out: Forensic Toxicology Steps Beyond the Lab

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