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Research Triangle Park
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14777 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
3,134 Words |
| Author
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William F. Little
William F. Little is the University Distinguished Professor of
Chemistry at the University of North Carolina, a former
president of the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced
Studies, and a current member of the governing boards of the
Research Triangle Foundation and the Research Triangle
Institute. |
The laser-scanning bar-code readers at retail checkout counters, Astroturf common to many sports stadiums, spectacles that help the deaf lip-read better, the best available treatment for genital herpes, and the best hope for restraining the effects of AIDS--these are some of the discoveries that are being made with increasing regularity from Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
Still less than 30 years old, the park derives its name from its location roughly equidistant from the three most prestigious universities in North Carolina--Duke University in Durham, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh. What was 6,700 acres of worn-out farmland in the late 1950s, inhabited largely by wild-life nesting in broom sage and scrub pines, has become one of the nation's foremost research complexes, the largest planned university-related research park, and a forest home to breeds also indigenous to the Fortune 500--Becton Dickinson, Data General, Dupont, General Electric, IBM, and Northrop. Migrant arrivals are equally blue chip--BASF Wyandotte of Germany, Burroughs Wellcome and Glaxo of Great Britain, Ciba-Geigy Biotechnology of Switzerland, Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research of Canada, Rhone-Poulenc of France, and Sumitomo Electric of Japan.
These corporations and some 40 of their neighbors occupy offices and laboratories distinguished by their architectural brilliance and spacious, sylvan grounds, landscaped to be as pleasing to the eye as they are soothing to the scientific mind.
The daytime population of the Research Triangle Park (RTP) now numbers over 30,000 employees, who, in addition to the multinational listed above, work for federal laboratories such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Center for Health Statistics, and a Forest Service Laboratory; for nonprofit enterprises such as the Chemical Industries Institute of Toxicology and the Underwriters Laboratories; and for a variety of state-and university-sponsored laboratories.
The National Humanities Center, affiliated with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is tucked away on a 15-acre wooded knoll in the park. It is now in its 10th year as an international cloister for humanistic scholars. Among its fellows have been the likes of Roosevelt scholar William E. Leuchtenberg and black history notable John Hope Franklin. Following the untimely death of Charles Frankel, its first director, William Bennett took the
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