When Liz Rooks started working with the Research Triangle Park Foundation 20 years ago, the big park looked much different.

"The southern portion of the park - the area south of Hopson Road - was totally undeveloped. It was all woodlands, a couple small farms there," said Rooks, the executive vice president for the Foundation. "There were a couple of farms on it with chickens and peacocks. When the farmer moved, one of the peacocks refused to go with him and so we had a wild peacock for a while."

The park has been around now for 50 years. Innovators and planning have turned those 7,000 acres of forest between Raleigh and Durham into a world-known piece of land.

"RTP is not only the largest in the U.S. and most successful research park, it really was the founder of the Research Park movement," said Rick Weddle, president and CEO of the Research Triangle Foundation. "The last 20 years' historical average was about three companies a year, about 50 acres absorbed and 950 or so new technology jobs."

The park now has about 45,000 employees. Add in contract workers, landscapers, food service, maintenance and more and the Foundation estimates about 65,000 work within the 23.5 million square feet of RTP.

"Before the park began, North Carolina had the second-lowest per capita income in the continental U.S. We surpassed only Mississippi," said Rooks.

Weddle believes the Park is riding out the recession better than other places and believes placing it in a good position will be important when we come out of it.

"What happens in downturns is the good get better and the strong grow great," said Weddle. "Companies during boom-times end up with facilities all over - everywhere. They buy this company, buy that company and their margins are good so they end up just maintaining what I would call illogical and irrational facility locations sometimes."

"When times get hard, they tend to consolidate."

Counties are depending on that sustainability.

Ted Conner, vice president of Economic Development and Community Sustainability for the Durham Chamber of Commerce, said about 75 percent of the land mass and about 90 percent of the companies are in Durham County.

"At times, the park has been very heavy in IT technologies and now it's very strong on pharmaceutical/life science technologies," Conner said. "Our whole county relies on RTP. It is really one of the important factors that determine our personality."

"A lot of companies don't necessarily cut their research at a certain point in time because they lose the benefit of that research. They may not start new research projects but you've got companies out there with research that's relatively stable."

Here's a list of some of the things invented at RTP:

• Technologies reducing nitrous oxides & sulfur oxides, developed by US EPA - Energy Engineering Research Lab in 1996.
• AZT by GlaxoSmithKline in 1987
• Taxol & camptotheca by RTI in the 1970s
• Discovery of G-proteins and identification of BRCAI by NIEHS in 1995
• BT Corn by Syngenta in 1995
• UPC codes for scanners by IBM
• Surface moisture/density gauge - "The Troxler" by Troxler Electronics
• Methods for disease treatment & diagnoses using metabolomics by Metabolin Inc. in 2004
• Three dimensional multimode & optical coupling devices by MCNC in 2004
• First router to handle a wireless network-RXI 820 by Ericsson in 2000
• Remodulin for hypertension by United Therapeutics in the late 90s
• AstroTurf by Chemstrand in the 1960s
• On-board airplane warning systems for wind shear by RTI (with NASA)
• Thermoelectric material more than twice as efficient & 23,000 X faster than existing technology by RTI in 2001
• Low sulfur, ultra-clean fuel by RTI in 2001
• Gamunex- medicine for Immune Globulin Intravenous by Bayer Biological Products in 2003