RTP: Solid anchor for high-tech growth
Staff Photo by Scott Sharpe
RTP looks to the future not just in the work done there, but also in the sleek architecture, such as the N.C. Biotech Center.
     The signs are as unassuming as any proper Southern gentleman -- green roadside markers that simply say, "Entering Research Triangle Park." The contemporary buildings are discreet, too, almost hidden behind tall pine trees and acres of farmland that never really lent itself to farming.
     But here, not far from the abandoned tobacco warehouses of downtown Durham, thousands of researchers and engineers have quietly spent nearly 40 years reinventing the world -- and the economy of central North Carolina. Here, at the company's largest plant, IBM Corp. builds most of its personal computers and created the first grocery store checkout scanners.
     Here, at the only one of the National Institutes of Health outside suburban Washington, scientists helped discover the gene that has been tied to some forms of breast cancer.
     Here, at what is now the U.S. headquarters of Glaxo Wellcome -- the world's largest pharmaceutical company -- researchers produced AZT, the first drug approved for treating AIDS and HIV.
     Research Triangle Park, or RTP, is a private, 6,800-acre development that straddles the Durham and Wake County lines, just a few miles west of the Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Interstate 40.
     Run by a nonprofit foundation, the park was created in the late 1950s by a visionary group of Tar Heel business leaders, university administrators and government officials.
     The park gets its name from its proximity to the area's three major research universities -- Duke University, N.C. State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ambitious N.C. Central University, a historically black college in nearby Durham, is playing a growing role at RTP -- and is building a biotechnology research center to try to play an even larger role.
     More than 100 companies and government research centers have offices in RTP. And many more have located in the growing number of industrial parks in Durham and nearby Morrisville.
     RTP hasn't entirely escaped the corporate downsizing of the 1990s. The merger of Glaxo Inc. and the Burroughs-Wellcome Co. and layoffs at IBM and Northern Telecom, now called Nortel, cost RTP thousands of jobs.
     So far, new arrivals -- including workers IBM transferred to the park from other locations -- seem to have offset those losses. The Research Triangle Foundation estimates that about 37,000 people work in RTP.
     Despite fears that federal budget cuts might hurt RTP giants such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, both institutions have done fairly well in recent years. The EPA won approval for a new $230 million research facility that should open around the turn of the century. And NIEHS continues to see its budget allotment rise.
     Most of RTP is in Durham, and the park's corporate citizens account for roughly 15 percent of the county's tax base.
     In Wake County, government officials and business leaders have been anxious to develop the southern portion of the park near Morrisville and Cary. Cisco Systems, one of the fastest growing computer networking firms, was in the vanguard of firms colonizing that area. Since then, Ericsson Inc., Biogen and Covance have started operations in the Wake side.
     Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the vast research park is its own success. The industrial parks and office buildings that now orbit RTP sometimes compete with the park to attract relocating companies. Meanwhile, rush-hour traffic is a growing annoyance -- especially on the Wake County side of the park, home to about 60 percent of RTP's work force.
     But as similar industrial centers across the country struggle to survive the lean '90s, the troubles of thriving Research Triangle Park are the envy of many local economies.