Editorial

Biotechnology

It’s been said many times over the past couple of years that North Carolina’s economy is in transition. And we all know what our economy is transitioning from — from furniture, textile and tobacco industries battered by cheap imports and changing markets. We’ve lost 150,000 manufacturing jobs that aren’t likely to return once the economy recovers.

So, what is our economy transitioning to? Although only time will tell, at this point it seems that biotechnology is our best bet for replacing nearly all those jobs at twice the wages. We examine that subject in this month’s Cover Story.

Biotech is a seed industry that North Carolina has fostered since the early 1980s but which only recently has achieved critical mass. North Carolina now has perhaps 150 biotech companies employing about 18,500 people. The industry is growing 10 to 15 percent a year, which means that by 2025 industry employment should grow to around 125,000 people. That would be the equivalent of tossing another RTP and a Charlotte University Park into the state’s economic future.

Our Cover Story starts by explaining what biotech is, which is difficult to do. As writer Heidi Russell Rafferty notes, it once was easy to explain what we manufactured in North Carolina. We made furniture. We made socks. We made blue jeans. But it’s very hard to explain what biotech companies make. They produce collections of living cells that become components of medicines, or enzymes used to improve the effectiveness of another product, such as the blue crystals in laundry detergent that are so effective in removing stains.

Many biotech companies are clustered in the Research Triangle but others are in counties outside the metro region, such as Novozymes’ huge enzyme plant in rural Franklinton pictured on the cover. Biotech’s potential for growing jobs across urban and rural counties is motivating the Research Triangle Regional Partnership to cooperate on a broad new strategy. The RTRP is the focus of the 24-page pullout section in this month’s issue. Charles Hayes, the RTRP president, explains the consortium’s biotech game plan in the Executive Voices column.

Bankrolling the state’s move to grow biotech companies is more than $100 million in seed money from the Golden LEAF Foundation that will pay for new university programs in the field and new community college training for workers. It seems ironic yet fitting that our inheritance from an old North Carolina industry, tobacco, is making the down payment on North Carolina’s New Economy home. -- Steve Tuttle


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