Realizing that pursuing this path might lead to a critical tipping point, a group of state business leaders and elected officials took up the idea of founding a research park and took it to then Governor Luther Hodges.  He’s famous for his support of this idea, but I’m told he was not at first keen on it. He agreed to set up a commission to review the concept, and he quickly became persuaded of its merits.

This was the proximity of three well-established and quite distinct institutions of higher education:  Duke had been a liberal arts college called Trinity College, but it was re-established as a comprehensive university in the 1920s; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the oldest public universities and most distinguished in the country; and then, not too far in another direction, North Carolina State University, which had begun as an agricultural and technical school and had grown into a place still anchored in those places but with rich developments.  The Triangle refers to the three universities, and if you saw the logo when you went to the headquarters, it has one shade of blue, a different shade of blue and a different shade of red – these are the three universities.  But please remember that in the first instance the universities weren’t originally partners.  They were brought aboard as partners as part of the original sales campaign of this idea.

But even more, the Research Triangle’s success is not to be identified just by listing the firms in the RTP.  RTP really did for this region the transformative work that those who envisioned it had in mind.   RTP has helped make this part of the state a place associated with economic dynamism, strong job growth, national and international connectivity – witness your presence here today – along with the cultural goods that tend to grow up in neighborhoods with high-end economic growth.  Walk across the street and you’ll see the great symphony hall. A great ballet is located here. In Durham, the American Dance Festival starts in a week – one of the principal dance festivals in America. This place is nationally known for its restaurants -- it used to have restaurants but it didn’t used to be nationally known for them.  [And it has] a very fine public education system. All these things that have grown up largely thanks to the incentive of RTP.

Now, you have learned that universities were in a sense anchor tenants of this park.  We were in from the founding idea.  I’m a university president so I thought that what I might usefully do in my time is just to offer a personal and frank and somewhat informal account of what have the benefits been on the university side.  It’s a complicated series of contributions and benefits.  What have we gotten out of having this neighbor?  What would we lack if we had not had such a neighbor?  I begin to answer that by saying the following:  What kind of business is a research university like Duke in?  We’re in the business of creating two products if you want to use that idiom.  One of them is knowledge creation.  We’re places that assemble teams of very smart, highly trained people to try to close the gap from what we already know and understand to what we don’t yet know and understand. They’re places of innovation, creativity, discovery -- in medicine, in business, in law, in public policy, in engineering, in the study of environment and elsewhere.  And the other work we do is not unrelated, the work of teaching or education or as we now call it, the building of human capital -- taking people of promise and so enmeshing them in the process of research and discovery that they emerge with their potentials well trained and can then go on and be constructive contributors later on.

So now if that’s the business that you’re in, then my question is, ‘What difference does it make to have something like RTP as your neighbor as opposed to going forward with the same kind of university without that kind of neighbor?’  There’s a way to put it poignantly, when you drive through RTP, it’s all trees.  But hidden in the trees is RTP.  But what if there really just were the trees there, which is pretty much what was here in 1957?

My answer’s going to have many parts.  First and to me most significant, a creation like RTP supplies a community of intelligence and active inquiry that no one university could create on its own.  We all know that we live in a world of the knowledge economy.  We all know how many features of economic growth and everyday life come out of discoveries that originated in obscure laboratory and research settings.  But one of the things we don’t sufficiently remember is that the knowledge economy does not and cannot thrive just everywhere.  The knowledge economy only thrives when there is a certain kind or eco-system around it -- a landscape with certain kinds of ingredients and certain kinds of relationships that stimulate and support knowledge creation in specific ways.

The first feature you need in that ecosystem is the phenomenon of critical mass.  A community of people who are similar enough in focus and training to be able to talk to each other but different enough in focus and training to be able to provoke each other, strike sparks from each other and lead each other in unexpected directions.  For the university and for each of the RTP’s tenants, the Research Triangle’s main function is that it supplies that critical mass. The massive growth of RTP and the three universities has brought a very large population of very smart, very highly trained people into a relatively small area so that the creative classes concentrated in the Triangle are among of the most highly educated in the United States.  I was told that there are more Ph.D.s per capita in this region of the country than in any other, which I promise you was not true in 1957.  The result of this is to create a community of inquiry far more sizeable than any one school or university or academic department could create -- conversational partners and potential colleagues in areas running from IT and biotech and nanotechnology and bioinformatics to the study of the environment and green technology and all the others that you know about. So one effect is an effect of mass, a community of intelligence.

Secondly, universities rise or fall on the level of talent they’re able to recruit.  If I were to ask myself another major benefit we get from the proximity of RTP, it’s that it is an extraordinarily powerful recruiting tool.  People come to us partly for the college they’ll find at Duke, partly for the college they’ll find six miles away in the Research Triangle.  They come to us partly for the academic attractions but partly for the amenities and qualities of life that have grown up supported by the population of the universities and RTP.  And let me now mention what is a very unobvious but extremely potent recruiting effect of the presence of RTP and it is this, a large portion of the graduate students and faculty that we want to attract are married to or have as significant partners people who are just as well educated and often just as professionally ambitious as themselves.  I can stand here and tell you if your university is the only industry in town, it is extremely hard to solve the problem of recruiting couples like that.  But if universities have other universities and the whole landscape of research around them there’s ever so many opportunities. Sometimes we help RTP recruit by having a place for someone in the university and sometimes the other way around.

I’ve talked about collaboration partnership, I’ve talked about recruiting, I would furthermore say for many of our students who come to Duke, they look to RTP as a place that gives valuable resources of experience in internships and employment research opportunities. These begin during their time at Duke and sometimes continue after graduation.  At our engineering school, we have what is I think regarded as one of the top two or three ranked biomedical engineering departments in the country.  Students who come to that program love to find opportunities to work in RTP in internships and in labs.  Upon graduation, four of our students have founded companies that are now located in RTP.  Who knows how many of our students now work in RTP?  In our business school, the Fuqua School of Business, many MBA students have chosen companies located in RTP to do their summer internships and then stay on for jobs after graduation.  RTP is also a partner in the start-up challenge managed by our business school and the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club.  Our smart students provide stimulation to colleagues in RTP, and the opportunities of RTP give our students practical education and support the culture of entrepreneurship that has become such an important part of their education.

Groups of colleagues, recruiting, hands on experience -- now I mention an unobvious advantage of the RTP here. RTP promotes collaboration among universities that might not take place if we didn’t  have RTP as a partner.  You’re here from many countries, you know that the American system of higher education is one of the most incomprehensible in the world.  There is no "system."  There is everything in this country.  There are secular universities, there are religious, there are public, there are private, there are large, there are small, and there is no system coordinating anything of it.  It’s this sort of patchwork interaction of un-programmed miscellany that gives American education the strength that it had.  But the relation that typically pertains among universities is either of separateness or indeed of competitiveness.  We are all very aware keenly of how we are ranked.  Our colleagues compete for federal research dollars.  We all compete for the top faculty.  We all compete for the top students.  This competition no doubt has many good effects but it does mean that there’s very little in the internal structure of American academic life that furthers the idea of collaboration among universities.

But this is where something like RTP can be helpful.  RTP entities have helped our local universities discover mutualities of interest and forms of collaboration that we would not have discovered on our own.  Everyone in this country is now so interested in questions of energy and sustainability partly for their consequence for the climate. The idea has become widely accepted in this country that solving the energy challenges of our time may not only provide climatic benefits but also economic benefits in the generation of new industries.  You will not be surprised to learn that every one of the three universities in this area has people who do important work in the energy sector.  But their work tended to be rather separate from each other until the intervention of RTP.  An organization in RTP called RTI, the Research Triangle Institute, has spotted the possible mutualities of interest in our energy groups and helped bring together a consortium, RTEC, Research Triangle Energy Consortium.  North Carolina State is especially strong in issues having to do with electrification of transportation, smart grids.  UNC has people who are national leaders in questions of solar power.  Duke has people who are national leaders in questions of carbon sequestration and the things that need to be verified before clean coal technology is likely to make much progress in this country.  RTI helped understand that all these things could be brought together both in ways that would be mutually supportive, in ways that would make us competitive for national grants, and in ways that would make RTP the natural regional convener for conversations about energy so that we have partners from all over this area and indeed from United States now coming to discussions here.

Finally, and this is I suppose the most the most obvious point, the relationship of a university like Duke to the Research Triangle Park is essential in providing links to help us fulfill our mission of translating academic research into the world of real world practice and real world service.

I don’t know if you know the story of Duke.  Duke was a small college called Trinity College until the industrialist James B. Duke gave a fortune to turn it into a comprehensive research university in the late 1920s.  He had in mind to create not just a place of international intellectual eminence but specifically a place that would link intellectual labor to practical benefit in the world.  He spoke of wanting to found a place that would be place of sane and practical rather than ideal and dogmatic education.  I love being associated with a sane institution.  In any case, moving forward from that founding, we have always had the idea that we want to think of the work of universities as forming an arc – an arc that extends from inquiry through discovery through translation to carrying the benefits of intellectual labor out into the world of real world practice and real world service.  But as you well know or unless in your country it’s very different from in this country, there are many reasons why that arc tends to be broken or discontinuous in American universities.  It’s the nature of American university culture that a lot of researchers don’t spend a lot of time thinking how to turn their ideas into practice or carry them out into worldly applications.  Publishing a work, having it be recognized by one’s colleagues seems the sufficient reward or the sufficient completion of the labor.  And even to the extent that we want to promote the practical development of innovations that are bred in our walls, universities themselves aren’t always well equipped to carry research discoveries and experimental hypotheses out to full development with all that requires in terms of funding mechanisms, managerial know how, specialized technology, expertise in navigating regulatory environments and so on.  Like most research universities, Duke does some of the work of tech transfer in-house but it is an essential advantage for both the university and its investigators to have access right down the street to a research and development apparatus that is adjacent to, that is complimentary with, but that is not identical with the apparatus of academic research to help faculty members carry their inventions into practicing commercial development.

I’ll give you two examples.  There is a product called Fuzeon.  This was a groundbreaking new drug that treats therapy-resistant AIDS.  It had its origins in the Duke lab of Professor Danny Bolognesi, former director of the Duke Center of AIDS Research. and Tom Mathews, associate professor of experimental surgery.  In the early 90’s, they developed technology that prevents infection by blocking the fusion of the virus with white blood cells.  With backing from investors and help from RTP, the start-up company Trimeris was formed.  Trimeris, along with Roche Pharmaceuticals now markets and distributes Fuzeon to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients around the world.  But you understand my point.  This wouldn’t have happened without the doctor’s discovery, but it also wouldn’t have happened if there were not a means to carry that discovery out.  You know that the word translation comes from the origin ‘carry across’.  It’s the carrying across function that has been so valuably performed by RTP.

Or I might mention a drug called Myozyme.  This cures a rare but extremely grave malady called Pompe’s Disease, a genetic disease that prevents the body from processing the enzymes needed to turn sugar into energy.  Children who have it never recover and progressively lose the ability to lift their head, to sit up straight, indeed to move.  A Duke researcher named Y. T. Chen, chief of medical genetics at Duke, found a possible treatment.  And because the disease is predictably fatal in infants, there was an increased sense of urgency to bring clinical trials and produce the medicine. To accomplish this, Duke only needed to look eight miles down the road.  The RTP-based drug development company Synpac provided the funding and resources to fine tune the research and to conduct the clinical trials, ultimately leading the FDA approval of Myozyme in 2006.

I’ll finish by saying I’ve been describing a lot of different kinds of benefits.  They’re different but they’re mutually supportive -- in practice they're somewhat hard to separate.  In these days of the modern research university, academic institutions can do more good than ever for their surrounding societies.  As I walk though my campus and I see the work people are doing on breast cancer, on genomic screening, on identifying ways to make roots grow to produce drought resistant crops, hand-held diagnostic devices that don’t require electricity to diagnose malaria…this is the kind of work one’s colleagues are doing in a great university.  All that work is being done -- all so important -- but we need a matrix of interaction in which many different kinds of institutions can work in un-programmed but collaborative fashion if we’re going to get that ‘idea work’ carried out into the world of commercialization and then into the world of human benefit.  Go back 50 years and you come to a time when the association of the universities of this area and the Research Triangle were patched together and they just seemed to have something to do with each other.  Over time a deep and mutually beneficial relationship has evolved, but I do not doubt that in the next 50 years this relationship will be tighter and tighter and the benefits will be greater and greater.