The gleaming marble floor and soaring atrium will impress people who tour the David H. Murdock Core Laboratory Building in Kannapolis Monday. So will the beautiful mural on its domed ceiling and the unique wooden table in its center. But the most important feature of the Core Lab ó the one that makes all the difference in the world of biotechnology ó sits in the basement, in an industrial-looking area called the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Suite.
The celebrity occupant is an Avance II 950 US2, a 950-megahertz NMR spectrometer with the strongest actively shielded superconducting magnet in the world. There’s one other like it, in Frankfurt.
Built by German-based Bruker BioSpin, the magnet is a much larger and more powerful cousin of the magnetic resonance imagers (MRIs) used for medical diagnosis by hospitals. “It’s really an incredibly remarkable thing,” Dr. Andrew Conrad, chief scientific officer at the campus, said in 2006. “It pulls apart molecules, lets us see their component parts … It allows us to ask questions that have never been asked before, and find answers that have never been answered.”
Four years ago no one could have imagined that such a piece of equipment would ever sit in Kannapolis. No one would have dreamed that huge, classically styled brick buildings could rise from the rubble of Pillowtex to house cutting-edge research in the fields of nutrition, disease and metabolism ó no one, that is, except David Murdock. He bought the old mill with the intention of breathing life back into Kannapolis and came up with a plan that Molly Broad, then president of the UNC system, embraced. Despite local skeptics who dare not dream as big as the California billionaire, the idea caught on in university circles and snowballed. And Murdock has not just been all talk concerning this project. By the end of the development, insiders expect that Murdock will have invested $1 billion in the N.C. Research Campus.
That is awesome, as is just about everything else about this project ó from Murdock’s daring to the Avance II’s power to the Core Lab Building’s rich details. This could be the Charlotte region’s best hope for the future. And it would never have happened without David Murdock’s vision.