RTP Leaders Unite to Advance Environmental Health

Abstract

When North Carolina’s Research Triangle Foundation provided 509 acres of land to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office in 1967 as the site for the newly established Division of Environmental Health Sciences, the area was probably not foreseen as a hub for companies, institutions, and government agencies working on issues related to environmental health. Then, just two years later, the Division of Environmental Health Sciences was elevated to institute status to form the NIEHS. Since that time, the area now known as Research Triangle Park (RTP) has expanded into a nucleus of intellectual activity in environmental health sciences that includes the National Toxicology Program, the laboratories of the U.S. EPA, the CIIT Centers for Health Research, and environmental research programs at Duke University, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, among other institutions and nonprofit organizations. These organizations are now taking advantage of a unique opportunity to solidify RTP’s reputation as the epicenter for environmental health science research in the United States by creating a forum for discussion and debate of the important public health issues related to environment and health. Prominent individuals in the RTP community—including former North Carolina governor James Hunt, former NIEHS director Kenneth Olden, and William Roper, chief executive officer of the North Carolina Health Care System and former head of the CDC—have been working to bring thought leaders together on these issues in a new initiative that has been dubbed the Research Triangle Environmental Health Collaborative. The mission of the collaborative is to connect organizations and institutions; link research and policy; and join government, academia, industry, and public interest groups for the purpose of mutually considering, discussing, and debating the grand challenges in environmental health at the regional, national, and international levels. Says Olden, “When I came to the NIEHS many years ago, I realized the talent base we have here in RTP. The major environmental health research institutions are all here, the intellectual resources of the major research universities, and also the companies that have evolved around this. No place else in the world can boast this concentration of minds working on environmental public health issues. So we thought that it follows that if you can help to focus these talents in the areas where perhaps the most change can be effected, real progress might be made.”