Research Triangle Park: How a Broke State Bet on Brains
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
In the mid-nineteen fifties, North Carolina ranked forty-seventh out of forty-eight states in per-capita income. Its economy was held up by three low-wage industries, tobacco, textiles, and furniture, and its best-educated young people kept leaving for jobs they couldn't find at home. Governor Luther Hodges and a loose coalition of bankers, university presidents, and civic boosters decided to try something audacious: build a research park so large and well-capitalized that major corporations would come to them.
The idea rested on geography. Three research universities formed a rough triangle in the Piedmont: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the west, Duke University at Durham to the northeast, and North Carolina State College at Raleigh to the southeast. A research park planted in the middle of that triangle could draw on all three faculties at once.
Archie Davis, a Wachovia Bank executive, volunteered to raise the money personally. He drove across the state, meeting local business leaders, and eventually collected one million four hundred twenty-five thousand dollars from more than eight hundred donors. That money bought the land and transferred it to a new nonprofit, the Research Triangle Foundation, in nineteen fifty-nine.
Five companies signed on that first year. Skeptics laughed. Then, in nineteen sixty-five, IBM announced it would build a six-hundred-thousand-square-foot research campus on four hundred acres inside the park. Doubt evaporated overnight.
What grew from that bet is now the largest planned research park in the United States. Burroughs Wellcome developed AZT, the first treatment for HIV, here. IBM invented the universal product code, the barcode on every box of cereal, inside these boundaries. GlaxoSmithKline, Biogen, and hundreds of other life-sciences firms followed.
North Carolina's per-capita income today ranks in the middle of the nation, not the bottom. A single generation transformed a tobacco economy into a biotech corridor, financed not by outside capital but by eight hundred people who each wrote a modest check.
