CENtral Science

As discussed in my post last week, I had the opportunity on Saturday to tour the old Burroughs-Wellcome US headquarters building in Research Triangle Park, NC. Designed in 1969 by architect Paul Rudolph, the building was completed in 1972. The building became known as the Elion-Hitchings Building after BW scientists Trudy Elion and George Hitchings shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicinewith Sir James Black.The building was acquired by Glaxo when they merged with Wellcome in 1995 (Glaxo had built its US headquarters in RTP in 1983, just north of the BW property.).

Now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the company began liquidating buildings and consumer products over the last two years. When they announced their intent to sell the Elion-Hitchings Building in April, 2011, I suggested that someone purchase it to fashion into hipster condominiums. My hopes were dashed when United Therapeutics purchased it and two other buildings for $17.5 million in late June of this year. United Therapeutics has a 55-acre lot adjacent to the GSK property where they’ve constructed a new headquarters building of their own.

What follows is a Storify compilation of my tweets from Saturday with photos that I sent out. I’ll post other photos later.

Since Stephanie is a news producer for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, I thought I should do some fact-checking and find the source for this factoid once I got home. Turns out that I was wrong — I underestimated the wooded requirement.According to RTP’s Land Management plan, the built-up area of each lot is limited to 30%, leaving much more of the pine forest than I had originally cited.

The story here is that I had originally purchased three tickets for later in the day before I realized that the time conflicted with my daughter’s soccer match. So on Friday night, I ran a little Twitter contest to give away these tickets.ADME-Tox guru and Collaborative Chemistry writer Sean Ekins was fortunately able to use one of my tickets — and I’m glad he did because his post on the visit is truly elegant and reflective on the metaphors this building holds for the past and present state of drug discovery. He also has much cleaner photos than I.

Here’s a sample of his writing:

A building so empty was a powerful metaphor for the pharma that was once a giant mass of people and knowledge. While we blame the current productivity/ innovation/ outsourcing trend and overall demise on many things, could the very buildings that house them be partly responsible. Our ability to layer knowledge on seperate floors, this upstairs/ downstairs dynamic with the executives removed from the brains below. And then the partitioning by cave like cubicles leaving only isolated whiteboards for sharing our ideas. It certainly made me wonder, and remind me of my interactions inside many a big pharma. I had seen this pattern before time and time again, perhaps the writing is still on the walls. I wonder if other moth-balled pharma sites like Sandwich still have such remnants? If we are to look at science from the future a snapshot of this building just would not be complete without a whiteboard..and a koala bear playing taps in code.

Many thanks to George Smart and Triangle Modernist Houses for making this tour possible. Volunteers told me that George had been negotiating this tour for several years. The vacancy made by the GSK sale to United Therapeutics provided an excellent time for the tour to take place.Thank you to all involved in making this possible.