Science in the Triangle

On a Friday afternoon, when traffic is bumper-to-bumper four lanes deep on Interstate 40 from Research Triangle Park to Raleigh, it’s hard to imagine RTP was nothing but scrub pines and possums 50 years ago.

Two years ago, I spoke with seven people who were involved in establishing one of North Carolina’s biggest economic engines in the mid-1950s. The interviews, which ran in the News & Observer, offered many interesting nuggets of information and a few surprises. But I was struck most by an old, black-and-white photo.

Taken from the air, it showed brush, grass and trees as far as the eye could see. That was RTP before three universities - Duke University in Durham, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and N.C. State University in Raleigh - a developer and state leaders pursued the idea to turn thousands of rolling acres covered with poor soil into a research park.

Back then, RTP promised to raise North Carolina’s per capita income, which was one of the lowest in the nation, stop the brain drain of college graduates and generate more tax dollars for state, county and local governments. A handful of recruiters worked their contacts to convince research-oriented companies in the Northeast and Midwest to expand their labs in North Carolina. Their efforts finally paid off in 1966, when IBM decided to open shop in RTP.

In 1959, the year RTP was officially opened as the second research park in the U.S., it was 4,400 acres. Three companies that had established operations employed fewer than 300. Of all the industries in the Triangle, only 15 percent were technology-based, new-line industries.

Today, RTP measures 7,000 acres and is one of 174 research parks in the U.S. More than 160 companies employ about 40,000 in the park alone. About half of the Triangle’s industry is high-tech.

Six more research parks have sprung up along I-40 and I-85 between Raleigh and Charlotte and the Triangle is one of the fastest growing areas in the nation.

Traveling on I-40, which didn’t exist in the 1950s, it’s easy to miss RTP, because most buildings are lower than the many trees surrounding them. The research park was conceived and planned during a time when America was moving to the suburbs and its layout reflects that. Now, we’re concerned with urban sprawl and traffic congestion. The Internet allows us to work from home or a coffeeshop. Countries like India and China, where labor costs are much lower than in the U.S., are competing with RTP.

The park itself has only about 530 acres left to develop. But some of the largest employers in RTP, such as GlaxoSmithKline and IBM, are scaling back. The challenges that RTP and other research parks will face in the future are among the issues that will be addressed at the International Association of Science Parks conference, which starts June 1 at the Raleigh Convention Center.