Crossing Research Triangle Park on Interstate 40 or visiting Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or N.C. State University provides little insight into what fuels one of the hottest U.S. research and development hubs.

Michael Walden

Sure, the Triangle was named the brainiest U.S. region and Raleigh the fastest growing metropolitan area last year. And the area’s vaunted labor pool continues to draw scientists and R&D companies from elsewhere, even though companies have closed shop or laid off employees in the past two years and the unemployment rate in the Triangle is nearly twice as high than before the economic downturn.

Mike Walden, an NCSU economist, doesn’t mince words when he assesses how important R&D is for the RTP area. “It’s one of our basic industries,” Walden said. “It’s one of the things that make us tick.”

But what sustains and boosts this industry that, it can be argued, flavors everything locally from schools to restaurants?

The credit usually goes to the three main research universities, Duke, UNC-CH and NCSU, and the hundreds of companies in and around RTP. But what specifically is it that they do to shape the RTP area? Is it the graduates they produce every year, the discoveries they spin off into local startup companies, or the money they spend on R&D?

Looks like the money spent on R&D is most important, according to a 2009 Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff report by Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz.

Nationwide, federal funds pay for a considerable amount of R&D to boost public knowledge and inform public policy. Especially universities and nonprofit institutes rely on research grants from the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in RTP, and other branches, such as the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.

Foundations, patient advocacy groups, wealthy individuals and large companies also pitch in.

R&D spending in the Triangle

In 2008, the Triangle’s three research universities and RTI International, an RTP-based research institute, spent about $2.34 billion on R&D, according to a survey by the National Science Foundation and RTI’s annual report.

That’s about double their 2001 R&D spending. The steep increase reflects a doubling of the NIH budget in the first half of the decade and emphasizes the importance of the life sciences in the area.

The $2.34 billion – the actual investment in R&D would be slightly higher if hard-to-come-by corporate R&D expenditures were included – represented about 2.7 percent of the area’s gross product that year. In 2008, the metropolitan areas surrounding Raleigh and Durham generated services and goods worth about $86 billion, according to figures by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The same year, retail contributed about 4.5 percent of the area’s gross product, BEA figures show.

Economists have long known about universities long reach locally, Abel and Deitz, the two staffers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, pointed out in their report. Universities generate the innovation and the educated labor force needed to drive a knowledge-based economy.

What Abel and Deitz added was the empirical evidence that degree generation was less important than R&D spending and the spillover from lots of research, meaning start-up companies that capture the most innovative technologies coming out of universities.

The two Federal Reserve staffers concluded that “research-intensive metropolitan areas tend to have larger shares of the most highly skilled occupations (e.g., those in the categories life, physical and social sciences; legal; computer and math; architecture and engineering; business and financial operations) and smaller shares of the lower skilled occupations (e.g., those in food preparation and serving; production).”

As Zoller, the executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business in Chapel Hill, sees it, it takes dealmaker networks to build companies based on research and technology.

One of the U.S. technopolies where these networks have developed is North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, ranked the brainiest area in the U.S. by the Daily Beast, an online publication that started the contest last year.

So, why isn’t the research Triangle Park area also the most entrepreneurial?

Zoller, an entrepreneur himself who teaches executives, scientists and budding entrepreneurs at UNC, attempts to answer that question in an interview with Science in the Triangle. He also addresses how the Internet is changing network building.

The video of the interview is interspersed with footage of Zoller teaching an executive MBA class at UNC:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Medicago’s facility is projected to cost $24 million and create 85 production jobs – small compared to the $300 million plant Novartis opened in 2009 in Holly Springs and the $400 million plant Merck completed two years ago north of Durham. The plant in Sanford that Pfizer bought last year as part of its $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth has been open since the late 1980s and employs about 450.

But then, the Medicago plant isn’t going to be like the other vaccine plants in the area.

Nicotiana benthamiana

Instead of fertilized chicken eggs, which have been used to make vaccine for more than 50 years, or factory-grown mammalian cells, a second-generation production technology, Medicago uses a wild tobacco relative, nicotiana benthamiana, a plant indigenous to Australia.

The 87,000 square-foot production plant near South Alston Ave. and NC 54 will include a greenhouse to grow the wild tobacco, said Andy Sheldon, Medicago’s chief executive. The plants are projected to produce up to 10 million doses of flu vaccine a month, Sheldon said.

That’s close to the 150 million flu vaccine doses Novartis projects to crank out per year in Holly Springs.

How does Medicago propose to do that?

It’s the wild tobacco and the proteins it produces, according to Sheldon and information about its technology that Medicago has published.

Medicago plans to grow up to 14,000 plants from seeds per day. After about five weeks, the plants are about three feet high. At that point, they come into a vaccuum infiltration tank filled with a solution of agrobacteria. The wild tobacco leaves suck up the solution in the infiltration bath like a sponge. The agrobacteria get into the plant cells and the cells start making hemagglutinin, a protein found on the surface of flu viruses.

Five to six days after the bath, the leaves are harvested and the hemagglutinin is pulled out.

Hemagglutinin comes in 16 different types, including H1, H2 and H3, which are found on human flu viruses such as the H1N1 virus that caused the pandemic flu outbreak last year. H5 is part of the avian flu virus, or H5N1. Hemagglutinin helps the virus bind to the cell and infect it.

Infectious flu virus

Medicago's non-infectious VLP

The protein the wild tobacco leaves produce is a virus-like particle, or VLP, not an inactivated virus. A VLP does not contain genetic material, is unable to replicate and non-infectious. But in preclinical studies VLPs produced a strong and broad immune response in mice and ferrets.

In February, Medicago researchers published a report detailing the benefits of VLPs and their production in wild tobacco plants.

The company is working on three different vaccines, one for seasonal flu, one of pandemic flu and one for avian flu. Only the avian flu vaccine has been tested in humans, but Sheldon said Medicago hopes to ask for regulatory approval of its seasonal flu vaccine as early as 2012.

Using wild tobacco to make flu vaccine is about six times faster and 12 times cheaper than using fertilized chicken eggs and the prospect of getting an effective vaccine fast intrigued the U.S. Department of Defense enough to grant Medicago $21 million to demonstrate that it can ramp up production to 10 million doses per month.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities agreed to invest $13.5 million and Medicago another $7.5 million.

Bringing a first product to market and generating revenue would be a big step for Medicago, which at the end of March had about $11.3 million in cash and $15.5 million in long-term debt. The company, which was founded in 1999 and has about 90 employees in Canada, is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Ted Zoller

North Carolina’s Research Triangle last year scored as the brainiest U.S. region, ahead of San Francisco’s Bay Area, which is home to Silicon Valley. Universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, a research and development hub of world renown and state economic engine, had a lot to do with the winning score.

But brainiest doesn’t mean most entrepreneurial as Ted Zoller, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, found out.

Depending on the counting method, the RTP area generated 1,500 startup companies since 1970 or 358 startups since 1984. Any way you look at the numbers, they represent a fraction of the more than 5,500 information technology and life science companies that have sprung up in Silicon Valley in the past 25 years.

So, how could the RTP area more effectively turn the local brainpower into companies that develop better medicines, faster computer chips and cleaner energy? What is needed to better capture the ideas and turn them into more businesses and jobs?

Incubators have long been the tool to do just that: help innovation hatch and grow.

RTP itself is kind of an incubator as the Daily Beast, the online publication that coined the smartest city contest, pointed out. Established more than 50 years ago on a few thousand acres unsuitable for agriculture, RTP was meant to attract R&D facilities of large corporations looking to expand.

A more traditional definition of a business incubator is a place where small, fledgling companies can develop technologies invented at universities or in large corporate labs. Incubators that fit that definition have also been around for about half a century. But not in RTP, which focused on corporate R&D activities for a long time.

The First Flight Venture Center, the oldest of at least eight existing technology-based business incubators in the Research Triangle, opened in 1991.

Rody Spivey, a plant physiologist at Agarigen, holds a container with genetically engineered button mushrooms

But the traditional model of a business incubator has evolved over the years. Aside from a common aim to nurture startups and spinoffs, incubators today may not even share the same designation. Some offer just inexpensive lab and office space to lease. Others also provide business advice, shared equipment or help with fund raising. Depending on the array of services offered, they may be called accelerators. Or they may be virtual, a network of contacts with expertise and deep pockets an inventor can tap.

Agarigen is one of an estimated 80 startups in RTP incubators, according to Anna Penner, RTP’s director of business development.

The company, which spun out of Pennsylvania State University, has leased office and lab space at the Park Research Center since 2007. Its 13 full-time employees are trying to coax genetically engineered button mushrooms to make proteins for 3 million vaccine doses in as little as three months.

Bacteria and yeast cells have been used to make proteins. Biogen Idec uses hamster cells at its large RTP plant and Biolex uses genetically engineered duckweed at its Pittsboro facility. Agarigen aims to set itself apart with a production system that’s less expensive, more flexible and faster – perfect to respond rapidly to emergencies or to counter biowarfare.

“Our system is just simpler,” said Don Walters, a molecular biologist who’s Agarigen’s co-founder and research director.

Walters and Agarigen’s other co-founder, Penn State mushroom science expert Peter Romaine, picked RTP to set up their startup because of the area’s talent pool in molecular biology, particularly in genetically engineering plant seeds. “RTP is one of the premier places on the planet,” Walters said.

He and Romaine have their own network of contacts and more than $9 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. All they need is space for labs and offices that’s reasonably priced. Park Research Center, a 13-building complex that for 30 years was the home of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was the most suitable of the handful of labs he checked out, Walters said.

Scott Daugherty

But different startups have different needs, said Scott Daugherty, executive director of the N.C. Small Business & Development Center.

Development of a life science technology usually requires dedicated lab space. Also, inventions made at a university must be developed off-campus or the university can make claims on the technology, Daugherty said.

Startups working on software or with computer technology could set up shop in the garage, he said. “You can do that at your kitchen table if you have enough computing power in your home.”

But a little seed money and expert advice can boost the number of startups being formed.

A key difference between Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle, Zoller found out, is the density of experienced entrepreneur and investor networks.  When he visualized them, the Silicon Valley networks formed a tightly wound ball of strings whereas the Research Triangle networks looked more like a necklace with a few beads strung here and there.

JoyStick Labs, one of the Research Triangle’s youngest incubators, plans to add some beads to the necklace. Formed about a month ago by a group of entrepreneurial experts, JoyStick Labs hopes to boost the number of video gaming companies and draw talent from gaming hubs in Atlanta and northern Virginia by offering up to $18,000 in seed money, use of its Durham facilities and mentoring from gaming experts and seasoned investors.

The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.

RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.

“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.

Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded about $1 billion – about $271 million from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

Dr. Maria Escolar

Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.

Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.

“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said.

In 1998, very little was known about Krabbe disease and similar metabolic diseases beyond the fact that they were fatal and no cure existed. Escolar, who now heads the program for neurodevelopmental function in rare disorders at the University of North Carolina Gene Therapy Center, was instrumental in changing that research gap.

In 2005, Escolar co-authored a landmark study on Krabbe disease that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study tracked the development of children with the disease who received transplants of umbilical-cord blood from healthy donors. The treatment was developed at Duke and was based on research Escolar and her colleagues at Duke and UNC did on the symptoms and progression of rare, genetic metabolic diseases.

Today, North Carolina’s Research Triangle area remains one of the few places in the world where children with these diseases are treated and new, experimental treatments are being explored.

During a presentation she made at the May TARDC luncheon at Research Triangle Park headquarters, Escolar outlined how much researchers have learned about the diseases since 1998 and what they still don’t know.

Also known as lysosomal storage disorders, these rare, genetic metabolic diseases are caused by mutations that are either inherited or happen spontaneously. The mutations disable enzymes the body needs to break down fat, protein and sugar molecules and make cell building blocks. Just one faulty enzyme can lead to the accumulation of undigested molecules that damage the brain and destroy the protective myelin sheath around nerves.

Lysosomal storage disorders occur in 1 in 100,000 people. The program Escolar heads at UNC has seen more than 400 affected children, 65 of them with Krabbe disease.

More than 100 of the children received umbilical-cord blood transplants.

Whether the transplants prolonged lives, prevented damage and lessened symptoms depended on the disease.

The transplant prevented cognitive damage in some of the children with Hunter Syndrome, a lysosomal storage disease that affects mostly boys. But others didn’t benefit and researchers are trying to find out why, Escolar said. The results in children with Sanfilippo Syndrome, another lysosomal storage disease, were equally puzzling. None of the children benefited from the transplants, except one boy whose social skills improved.

In children with Krabbe disease, the transplants were most effective when given before symptoms developed. Children who were treated within three months of birth suffered much less brain damage than children who were treated later, but even among the youngest transplant patients some showed delays in the development of motor skills.

“Now we understand that transplantation fixes a lot of problems, but we’re not catching it early enough,” Escolar said. A diagnosis in the first two years of life is crucial, she said. Newborn screening for Krabbe disease, as it was introduced in the state of New York in 2006, would be best, she added.

Researchers are also exploring treatment alternatives. Umbilical-cord blood transplantations have a 15 percent mortality risk, because they require chemotherapy and a year’s worth of immunosuppressive drugs. Some European researchers have tried treating the bone marrow of affected children. At UNC, researchers are looking into versions of gene therapy.

PHOTO BY TODD SUMLIN – tsumlin@charlotteobserver.com: Northwest Cabarrus High student Brendon Schaumburg, left, works on his senior project with technology facilitator Julie LaChance.

Teens across the country are starting to play computer games in school – and their teachers encourage them.

It’s called three-dimensional learning, and it has little in common with the 1980s video arcades parents remember.

In North Carolina, high school students who take an elective called “Computer Applications 2″ get introduced to Second Life or ReactionGrid, 3-D virtual worlds in which each player has an avatar – like a digital sock puppet that the user controls. In at least one school district, middle school students sit down at computers to play 3-D games in math and language arts classes.

3-D learning makes immediate sense to anybody born after 1985, because the advances in computer technology that stripped video games of their less-than-wholesome image also made the Internet an integral part of everyday life. For teens growing up in a world of Twitter and Facebook and game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, it’s no stretch to slip into an avatar and learn about prime numbers, creative writing or citizenship.

“Everybody knows about technology; 3-year-olds can navigate a laptop,” said Brendon Schaumburg, a senior at Northwest Cabarrus High School in Concord who has played video games since he can remember.

To test ideas for his senior project – an aquaponic greenhouse in a 40-gallon fish tank – Schaumburg logs on to Second Life, where his avatar, Brendon Bilavio, can tinker on a virtual prototype of the greenhouse.

Simulated environments that are colorful, nuanced and lifelike require powerful and fast computers, but they are a key to 3-D learning. Students who enter these environments find themselves on islands, in castles or underwater. They encounter healers, dragons, magicians or a guy with a mohawk. Playing requires taking on different roles, solving puzzles or going on a quest with other players who sit in front of their computers in the same room or thousands of miles away. Sometimes there’s even money to be made that can be spent in-world or converted into U.S. dollars.

Immersion in the game blurs the line between virtual world and real life, and students become apprentices who gain hands-on experience. Mistakes are teachable moments without leaving behind real-life messes.

“The generation that’s coming up is totally absorbed in (the virtual world),” said Julie LaChance, who is charged with integrating technology into classrooms in Cabarrus County schools. “The kids just pick it up. To them it is common, whereas when I talk to a 40-year-old teacher about having an avatar, they look at me like I’m crazy.”

Crazy maybe, but effective.

3-D learning works up to 63 percent better than lectures and allows students to improve their math, science and language skills, according to a report the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation published last year. Students using computer-generated games to learn algebra were on average able to raise their test results by one grade.

The military, the government and large corporations such as IBM also have adopted 3-D learning. It has been used successfully with students who are deaf or autistic. This year, the New Media Consortium, which lists hundreds of universities, museums and research institutes among its members, identified computer games as one of a handful of emerging technologies that will affect learning, teaching, research and creative expression over the next three years.

3-D learning also has support in the White House. First lady Michelle Obama recently challenged software developers to design video games that teach children about nutritious foods.

“The immersive Internet is the next wave of the net,” said Tony O’Driscoll, a 3-D learning expert at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business who practices what he preaches.

O’Driscoll co-authored the book “Learning in 3D” (Pfeiffer, 2010) with Karl Kapp, a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa. The authors discussed it at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education conference in March – a conference that took place on 20 virtual islands in Second Life. More than 2,000 educators from 69 countries attended. Like the other participants, O’Driscoll came in the body of a voice-activated avatar: Wada Tripp looks like O’Driscoll but has no specks of gray in his black hair.

What makes 3-D learning stick is a student’s ability to manipulate dials and interact with others in a computer game, said Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games program manager at IBM in Research Triangle Park. “It’s doing versus passive learning.”

Boinodiris, who’s a longtime gamer herself, is behind Innov8, an IBM computer game used by more than 1,000 business schools and companies nationwide. They include Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

The game teaches teams of students how to overcome hurdles that can cause bottlenecks or other delays at a company. One version requires the team to collect information and solve puzzles based on real-life events, such as the situation a plywood supplier faces when a hurricane approaches. The students have to figure out, for example, how much plywood the supplier should stock to meet customers’ demands and be profitable.

Logan, a female consultant in a call center, is the Innov8 avatar in whose skin each team has to slip to walk around the company, interview employees and collect clues in the game.

Boinodiris’ group has also created a game called CityOne, which doesn’t have an avatar. CityOne, which will be available in the fall, teaches how industries, such as banking and retail, are connected with city utilities and city government. To create the game, Boinodiris said, her team relied on subject matter experts worldwide. “It takes an army to make a game like this,” she said.

Games aimed at high school and middle school students are created to work in a similar fashion, but they pursue different goals.

In Pender County, a school district north of Wilmington, teams of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who struggled with state algebra tests played a 3-D game called DimensionM during the 2008-2009 school year. Each team came up with an avatar and researched strange disasters on an island. They needed math to solve the mysteries. This school year, seventh graders played a game called Sims to explore elements of fiction writing. Sims simulates daily activities of one or more characters in a suburban household and results of the Pender County creative writing project are posted on a wiki, a Web site with links to other sites on the Internet.

“The experience is embedded in the story line,” said Lucas Gillispie, the instructional technology coordinator for Pender County schools. “Games are powerful learning tools. A player takes a role in the story, which is a multi-sensory experience. By doing, you hit on a wider variety of learning styles.”

Gillispie also introduced World of Warcraft, with about 10 million players per year the most popular 3-D game worldwide, to Pender County schools. A longtime WoW player himself, he offers the game for two hours after school to struggling, at-risk middle school students. The students must learn online manners, work together in guilds and develop leadership skills to go on the fantastical quests. They must also read game instructions, figure out how much gold they have in the WoW bank and write messages to each other.

The students presented Gillispie’s WoW project at the same VWBPE conference where O’Driscoll and Kapp talked about their 3-D learning book. When the students realized that they were about to take educators from around the world on a virtual tour of WoW, Gillispie wrote in his blog, Edurealms.com, “they very quickly went from silliness to seriousness. In fact, in my 10+ years as an educator, I’ve never seen such an abrupt transformation among students. In their minds, they were beginning to take ownership of the idea and realizing that they, in fact, would be the experts teaching the teachers.”

Schaumburg, the Northwest Cabarrus High School senior, got hooked on Second Life because the virtual world was a place where he could test his idea of ending world hunger by using solar energy and sustainable farming methods. With the help of LaChance, his mentor and the owner of the EDTECH Retreat island in Second Life, he built a virtual four-story greenhouse with the same 1-acre footprint as the Empire State Building in New York.

The Second Life prototype allowed Schaumburg to test his business model for growing organic food in water that is fertilized by fish. He figured that his aquaponic method could produce 18 times as many tomatoes per acre than conventional agriculture.

To finish his project, Schaumburg has only one task left to do. Equipped with data from the Second Life prototype, research he did in botanical gardens and greenhouses in the Charlotte area and expert advice from gardeners, engineers and biologists, he will build a real-world greenhouse in his fish tank.