A world of knowledge: RTI International thinks it can continue to flourish by using minds over matters.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY - Research Triangle Institute - Organization overview - Cover story

Outside Wayne Holden's window, in a laboratory a few hundred yards away across a piney campus, Dave Dayton uncaps a vial. "Smell," he says. Inside is what appears to be crude oil with the scent of a campfire. Surrounded by tanks, vats, instruments and stainless-steel tubing, he and fellow researchers use heat and pressure to mimic nature, creating a liquid that can be blended in refineries with the petroleum it replicates. Made from nonfood organic materials such as sawdust, it has vast commercial potential: an eco-friendly biofuel priced competitively with gasoline and diesel.

In a different lab is Peter Stout, another of Holden's scientists. "One of the big things now," the forensics expert says, "is touch DNA. Touch DNA might be the trace I leave behind when I bite something or when my lips touch a cigarette butt." That's not all he and his colleagues explore. Last year, for example, they certified labs that tested 71/2 million people for drug use.

Not everybody works in a lab. Some chart the repercussions of eating too many Big Macs, calculating obesity's impact on the nation's economy. Others sample public and scientific opinion. Designers work with psychologists to create shocking images of disease to dissuade tobacco users. Half a world away, teams guided Iraqis learning to govern themselves. Scientists coached China on how to manage air pollution during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Their forerunners identified toxic chemicals bubbling up around a Niagara Falls, N.Y., school in the 1970s. That was Love Canal, which triggered environmental awareness in many Americans.

In many ways, Holden seems as incongruous as the organization he heads. In March, he became RTI International's fourth president and CEO since it was created in 1958, as Research Triangle Institute, for the nascent research park being built between Durham and Raleigh. A robust 6-foot-8, he's by training a child psychologist, a former professor who left academia to work for an opinion-research company. One night, hulling upright in bed, he moaned to his wife: "Oh, my god., I left a tenured position to do this." She laughed. "Most people don't know what tenure is," she told him. "This is the real world." When he left to join RTI in 2005, he was the company's president, overseeing 900 employees and a $140-million-a-year budget.

Holden, 55, now runs one of North Carolina's oddest enter rises, with more than 4,000 employees in 40 countries, 2,800 of them full-time and based here. Its researchers, most with doctorates, have degrees in some 120 fields and work on 1,200 or so projects as different as seeking new cancer drugs, improving public health in Madagascar, developing nanofibers and creating cheaper and more durable highway pavement. They tackle real-world problems, and now they're facing one of their own.

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Can a brainy cohort that thrives on what private industry would deem a laughably unfocused mission--in essence, "Make things better for folks everywhere"--go corporate without selling the soul that has made it one of the world's most-respected research organizations? "It's a real challenge," says Bill Moore, chairman of Raleigh-based Lookout Capital LLC, which invests in small, growing companies. As chairman of RTI's board, he headed the search team that selected Holden for his new role. "RTI has been incredibly successful, but we certainly don't have just a smooth, unblemished, wonderful future ahead."

The man charged with shaping that future agrees. "Our success, particularly in the last 15 years, has been in being very, very good at understanding the federal procurement system, writing good proposals for research problems and getting federal funding," Holden says. In its fiscal year that ended in September 2011, RTI had revenue of $777 million. That was a record, up from $759 million the year before. He estimated it decreased to about $720 million in the year just ended. Commercial clients include industrial giants such as AstraZeneca PLC, the London-based drugmaker; San Francisco-based Cisco Systems Inc., the computer-networking company whose plant in Research Triangle Park employs more than 4,500; and The Shaw Group Inc., the Baton Rouge, La., builder of nuclear plants, which has about 1,400 employees in Charlotte. But nongovernment projects made up only about $83 million--11%--of revenue in fiscal 2011.

In a weak economy, with politicians campaigning on promises to slash spending and some fretting about a growing anti-intellectual, anti-science movement, RTI's dependence on public money is cause for concern. "It's a bad time to be in business with the government," says Jonathan Morris, an East Carolina University political scientist who focuses on election politics and Congress. "I'd certainly be uneasy if 85% of my funding were government. Contracts aren't written in stone. You know if they're going after entitlements and defense, they're definitely going to be looking at contracts...