It's not easy being "Green" — If you tear-down a Landmark

Meet Martine Rothblatt, CEO of United Therapeutics. She owns Rudolph’s Kerr Residence in Florida & should be a fan. After promising to preserve it, her company tore down the only Rudolph in NC – the Burroughs Wellcome building in RTP. Now she’s going to lecture on Green Construction…

Burroughs Wellcome was recognized as landmark-worthy in a HABS report by the National Park Service. We fought, along with other organizations, to save the building & thousands of you signed a petition to stop the demolition. But what did Martine do? She sent her PR team to ask us to take down parts of our website that referred to the petition and demolition…

She cares about ‘green construction, including the world’s largest zero carbon building & laboratories, office buildings & residences.’ Zero carbon is not ‘green’ when you send 546,335 cubic feet of construction & 3,100 tons of steel to the dump to make way for your new project…

#Greenbuild invited her to give a keynote at tomorrow’s Global Health & Wellness Summit on Sept 9, 2021. According to https://informaconnect.com/greenbuild/summits/ the summit will ‘discuss how spaces are being redefined amid the ongoing climate crisis’ but does Martine’s solution make the problem worse in order to ‘fix’ it? The greenest building is the one that already exists…

PLEASE SHARE & IF YOU’RE GOING TO ATTEND ask WHY she tore down a Paul Rudolph landmark. Ask if the millions of $$ a year she makes as CEO of the company is the GREEN they mean in ‘Green Construction.’ More about the building is on our website (which Martine’s PR team doesn’t want you to see) at www.bit.ly/rudolphdemo

#PaulRudolph #greenbuild #greenbuilding #greenconstruction #RTP #architecture #brutalism #climate #wellbeing #UnitedTherapeutics @WELLcertified @USGBC @rickfedrizzi @docomomous @WorldGBC @ArchitectsJrnal @AIANational @archpaper @ArchRecord @usmodernist @preservationaction @bwfund @presnc @preservationdurham @c20society @brutalism_appreciation_society @sosbrutalism @ncarchitecture @savingplaces @modarchitecture

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IMAGE CREDITS

NOTES:

The Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation gratefully thanks all the individuals and organizations whose images are used in this non-profit scholarly and educational project.

The credits are shown when known to us, and are to the best of our knowledge, but the origin and connected rights of many images (especially vintage photos and other vintage materials) are often difficult determine. In all cases the materials are used in-good faith, and in fair use, in our non-profit, scholarly, and educational efforts. If any use, credits, or rights need to be amended or changed, please let us know.

When/If Wikimedia Commons links are provided, they are linked to the information page for that particular image. Information about the rights for the use of each of those images, as well as technical information on the images, can be found on those individual pages.

CREDITS:

Photograph of Martine Rothblatt: Andre Chung, via Wikimedia Commons; Photograph of the Burroughs Wellcome building, in the process of demolition: detail of a photograph by news photojournalist Robert Willett, as they appeared in a January 12, 2021 on-line article in the Raleigh, NC based newspaper The News & Observer; Logo of the Global Health & Wellness Summit: from the web page devoted to the event.

The Burroughs Wellcome Building: Incubator of Nobel Prize-Winning Research— and Cures

The Nobel Prize—the world’s most distinguished form of recognition. Show here is the Nobel medal, awarded to each recipient. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

ULTIMATE ACHIEVEMENT

Can buildings make a difference for the people who live and work in them? The power of design is an article of faith for architects, but the ultimate verification comes from the evidence presented by the users—individuals who actually inhabit their designs. Here’s testimony from one who worked at at Paul Rudolph’s Burroughs Wellcome building:

I spent 32 years with [Burroughs Wellcome]. . . .and helped work on the layout of the labs to fit the 22.5 degree sloping walls of bright orange and blue. At that time, if any space was conceived to bring out the creative, inspirational, thoughts—this was it, in my opinion. I loved working there. We invented and developed more pharmaceutical products in those years. . . .We were “family” but more to the point we were colleagues who were allowed to trust the expertise of each other.

Even more convincing evidence of the positive environment of the building is the work which emerged from Burroughs Wellcome: the scientific research, and the products which were the practical application of that research. When that research saves, ultimately, many millions of lives, there could be no finer acknowledgement of great human and scientific accomplishment—but when the creators of that work is then recognized by the world’s most distinguished judges, one has risen to a level few ever achieve.

That is what happened with the work of Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings. It was for their work over decades (and particularly the work done while they were at the Burroughs Wellcome building in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park) that they became Nobel Prize laureates in Medicine in 1988.

“Wellcome News” was the journal of the Burroughs Wellcome company. This is the cover of their “Special Nobel Prize Issue” from 1988, showing the prize-winning scientists, Elion and Hitchings (who had done much of their research within the Rudolph-designed building in Research Triangle Park.) A close viewing of the photo will reveal Burroughs Wellcome’s famous unicorn logo on Dr. Elion’s lab coat. Image courtesy of: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)

THE NOBEL PRIZE

Here are excerpts from the official announcement of Elion’s and Hitchings’ prize:

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute has today decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1988 jointly to Sir James W. Black, Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings.

The discoveries awarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine concern important principles in drug treatment, principles that have resulted in the development of a series of new drugs.. . .

The discoveries awarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine concern the development of new drugs which have become essential in the treatment of a number of different disorders, mainly myocardial ischemia (angina pectoris), hypertension, gastroduodenal ulcer, leukemia, gout and infectious diseases. However, the research work carried out by Black, Elion and Hitchings has had a more fundamental significance. While drug development had earlier mainly been built on chemical modification of natural products they introduced a more rational approach based on the understanding of basic biochemical and physiological processes.

. . . .An even more recent application of these ideas is the development of azidothymidine (AZT) which was described in 1985 by other scientists from the same institute, and which is the hitherto best documented drug in the treatment of AIDS. It can be added that trimethoprim-sulfa is used in the treatment of Pneumocystis carinii, a relatively common complication to AIDS.

The official Nobel Prize website features an article on Gertrude Elion, citing her as an example of Women Who Changed Science. It includes numerous images from her life, including her time working at Burroughs Wellcome. This scan from the web page shows Elion and Hitchings, together in front of a 1976 addition to the building,, also designed by Paul Rudolph

Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Gertrude Elion (left) and Dr. George Hitchings (right) worked together for several decades, before being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988 for their research. Here, they are photographed working in their laboratory, circa 1948. Photograph courtesy of GlaxoSmithKline plc., GSK Heritage Archives, via Wikimedia

The Burroughs Wellcome building was renamed the Elion-Hitchings Building in 1988, honoring Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings. It’s worth speaking of their careers and research—including the era when they were working at the Burroughs Wellcome building in Research Triangle Park.

Nobel Prize winner Dr. Gertrude Elion, photographed in 1983. Image courtesy of GlaxoSmithKline plc., GSK Heritage Archives, via Wikimedia

GERTRUDE ELION

(1918-1999) From 1967 to 1983, Elion was the Head of the Department of Experimental Therapy for Burroughs Wellcome. She officially retired in 1983—but even after her retirement from Burroughs Wellcome, she continued almost full-time work at the lab. She played a significant role in the development of AZT, one of the first drugs used to treat HIV and AIDS.

Rather than relying on trial-and-error, Elion and Hitchings discovered new drugs using rational drug design, which used the differences in biochemistry and metabolism between normal human cells and  pathogens (disease-causing agents such as cancer cells, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses) to design drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of particular pathogens without harming human cells. The drugs they developed are used to treat a variety of maladies, such as leukemia, malaria, lupus, hepatitis, arthritis, gout, and organ transplant rejection.

Elion was Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and of Experimental Medicine from 1971 to 1983, and Research Professor at Duke University from 1983 to 1999. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990, a member of the Institute of Medicine in 1991, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences also in 1991.

Nobel Prize winner Dr. George Hitchings. Image courtesy of Wellcome Images, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom., via Wikimedia

gEORGE HITCHINGS

(1905-1998) In 1942, Hitchings went to work for Wellcome Research Laboratories at in their Tuckahoe laboratory (their US research center, before it was moved to North Carolina). There, he began working with Gertrude Elion in 1944. Drugs Hitchings' team worked on included 2,6-diaminopurine (a compound to treat leukemia) and p-chlorophenoxy-2,4-diaminopyrimidine (a folic acid antagonist). According to his Nobel Prize autobiography,

The line of inquiry we had begun in the 1940s [also] yielded new drug therapies for malaria (pyrimethamine), leukemia (6-mercaptopurine and thioguanine), gout (allopurinol), organ transplantation (azathioprine) and bacterial infections (co-trimoxazole (trimethoprim A)). The new knowledge contributed by our studies pointed the way for investigations that led to major antiviral drugs. . [including for] AIDS (zidovudine).

In 1967 Hitchings became Vice President in Charge of Research of Burroughs-Wellcome. He became Scientist Emeritus in 1976. He also served as Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and of Experimental Medicine from 1970 to 1985 at Duke University.

The ground breaking ceremony for the Burroughs Wellcome building. Both the architect—Paul Rudolph, at far right)—and one of the firm’s most distinguished scientists—Dr. Hitchings, standing next to him—are participants at the occasion. Credit: Wellcome News, Summer/Fall 1969 Issue. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Dr. Hitchings (left) and Dr. Elion (right), 1988, the year they received the Nobel Prize. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.

YOU CAN HELP SAVE BURROUGHS WELLCOME !

The Burroughs Wellcome building is threated with imminent demolition.

It’s loss would be a disaster—a titanic waste of our nation’s cultural heritage.

When a great building is destroyed, there are no second chances.

NOW— THERE ARE TWO THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Sign the petition to save Burroughs Wellcome. You can sign it here.

• We’ll send you bulletins about the latest developments. To get them, please join our foundation’s mailing list: you’ll get all the updates, (as well as other Rudolphian news.)—you can sign up at the bottom of this page.

The Burroughs Wellcome building, designed by Paul Rudolph—the site of Nobel Prize-winning, and life-saving research. Image courtesy of Joseph W. Molitor architectural photographs. Located in Columbia University, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Department of Drawings & Archives