Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

Chemist Gertrude Elion expressed incredulity when the pharmaceutical firm Burroughs Wellcome first sent her packing to RTP in 1970. “We didn’t see any sign of civilization,” Elion recalled. “We wondered, ‘What in the world are we getting into?’ ”¹ Indeed, as noted in a New York Times article, the verdant research park—“a landscape vivid with the brilliant hue of the sweet gum and deep green of the loblolly pine…[where] the hand of man is every where tastefully and somewhat sterilely evident”—was about as far from the gritty Bronx of Elion’s youth as possible.²

When historian Peter Coclanis, then a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, was planning to visit UNC for a job talk over a decade later, a faculty member—a lifelong, inveterate New Yorker—joked about the prospect of moving to North Carolina: “You could spend a night in Chapel Hill,” the professor said. “Maybe a weekend, but you could never live there.” Coclanis, in fact, came to UNC to stay, becoming a distinguished professor of history and director of the Global Research Institute.³

Such doubts are not surprising, least of all coming from New Yorkers. “Northern scientists and intellectuals…are having trouble grasping the concept of ‘brain drain to the South,’ ” as the Times’s Wayne King noted in 1977.⁴

Take the case of Tom Wenger. A Jewish kid from Long Island, Wenger grew up in a diverse community. “It had both Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics,” he later joked. The public schoolers in his neighborhood lived in fear of the parochial school kids who worked out their pent-up anger by roaming the streets looking for boys like him to beat up. As Wenger moved up the chain of social mobility in postwar America, he learned more about the ugly realities of urban life. After medical school at Boston University, he continued his training at a Harlem hospital, which was engulfed by the chaos and poverty of New York in the early 1970s. “It was very like being on the front line of a war,” he recalled, “only somebody else’s body was at risk; not yours; your patient’s was at risk and more than likely not going to make it.”5

Coping with 100 emotionally draining hours a week of work in a massively underserved urban hospital was not easy on Wenger. So the budding doctor looked elsewhere to do his fellowship. Duke University was pioneering electrophysiology in the early 1970s, and the field appealed to him. But getting his wife on board with moving to the South was not easy either. The couple had never really heard of Durham, despite the fact that it was a much bigger city than Chapel Hill (albeit minuscule compared with New York). Ultimately his wife insisted on Durham because life in a tiny college town full of undergraduates—Chapel Hill—turned her off. “Frankly, we’re in our mid-20s now,” she said, “and the last thing I wanna do when I walk out of my house is to have undergraduates fucking under every bush.” So Durham it was.⁶

The Wengers were part of a wave of outsiders who came to the Triangle beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the 1970s and 1980s. They brought different sensibilities about issues such as culture, race, and religion to the Triangle, even if Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were widely reputed to be more progressive than the rest of the South. They established prosperous careers—Tom at Duke and, soon after, Burroughs Wellcome, and his wife with a successful dance company she founded.

Other affluent newcomers largely gravitated toward Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and the booming Wake County suburb of Cary, but the Wengers chose Durham. Still, their progressiveness had its limits. They were anxious about the quality of integrated schools, and realtors tended to steer these new, largely white families away from Durham City schools and toward suburban Durham County schools and neighboring Wake County. Although Wenger said he favored integration, he admitted, “It never even occurred to me to send them to public schools in Durham; I sent them to private schools.”⁷

Segregation in schools may have persisted and reconstituted itself across the metropolitan landscape from the 1970s forward, but nevertheless, families like the Wengers found an appealing home with rewarding work amid the verdant laboratories of RTP and the rapidly growing suburbs of the greater Triangle. Affluent African American and Asian families joined them, albeit haltingly. For those with well-paid jobs in education, science, and tech and homes in affluent suburbs, the deal offered by the Triangle was satisfactory—even ideal, if they could accept the modest cultural offerings of the universities and local arts institutions.

By the 1980s, the Triangle had succeeded in diminishing the stigma of the South and winning a reputation as a place for innovative companies and people—with RTP at its center. Smita Patel moved first from India to New Jersey and then to North Carolina in 1981, after her husband, an engineer, accepted a job at Sperry Rand in Durham. The family moved into the suburb of Parkwood, next to RTP, and enjoyed the mild weather, short commutes, and friendliness of their neighbors, despite the dearth of local shopping and eating options. The Patels had to order groceries from a brother-in-law in New Jersey. “You were lucky to find cilantro around here, no?” Patel recalled.8

Engineer Chuck Till, who came to Raleigh from Atlanta in the 1980s to work at Northern Telecom in RTP, admitted wondering if coming to a metro area that numbered in the hundreds of thousands instead of millions would be a good choice. “There was the North Carolina Symphony,” he said. “Probably not as good as the Atlanta Symphony, but at least there was one. There was an art museum. Probably not as good as the High Museum in Atlanta, but there was one. It was pretty good culture associated with Duke and UNC.”⁹

As ever, the universities took a central role in allaying the anxieties of outsiders about what boll weevil–ridden pit stop they might be forced to accept if their employer moved to the park. Journalist Peter Range assured readers of the New York Times in the 1970s that Chapel Hill’s more pious neighbors mostly “maintain[ed] a friendly respect for all of the hairy, book-toting atheists in their midst.” It might not be the West Village or Harvard Square, but at least “the intellectual community has less arrogant scorn for its non-academic, more fundamentalist neighbors than any assemblage of eggheads east of the Iowa Writers Workshop.”¹⁰