From the air, it strikes an impressive pose: an E-shaped brick building looking west, the grounds surrounding it a cushion against a wide circle of hot concrete. Thousands of cars pass its east-side entrance each day; thousands more speed by its south border. But few of the travelers are likely aware of the history that now marks its 50th year.
The Northern Regional Research Center (NRRC), born by an act of Congress, watches over I-74 traffic from a 40-acre parcel in south-central Peoria, Illinois. On muggy summer nights, its parking lot is awash in floodlights that rain down from the adjacent minor league baseball stadium. Inside the darkened building, refrigerators whirl, compressors hum, and research awaits the morning shift.
Some 400 U.S. government and contract employees work at the site, which was first known as the Northern Regional Research Laboratory. A move is afoot in Washington to change the name again, this time to the National Agriculture Research Center, to better reflect the federal nature of its existence.
The whole thing began with a congressional directive to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in 1938. In part, the Agricultural Adjustment Act called for the establishment of four regional laboratories to "conduct researches into and to develop new scientific, chemical, and technical uses and new extended markets and outlets for farm commodities and products and byproducts" of those commodities. The labs were built in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Peoria, and Albany, California. Their doors opened in 1940.
In terms of American history, 50 years may not seem like a lot. But in terms of U.S. agricultural research and the quest to improve farm production, the period is long indeed. What has been envisioned and what has been accomplished have matched up well over the years, so much so that today the Peoria center stands as one of the preeminent research laboratories devoted to agriculture.
Run by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the science arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the center is focused on three research objectives: enhancing food quality, quantity, and safety; using crop materials as renewable resources; and increasing the efficiency of crop production and protection.
In 1941, the lab received its first major assignment. A Scotsman working at St. Mary's Hospital in London had discovered years earlier a mold that secreted a bacteria-killing substance he called penicillin. Alexander Fleming found it would destroy bacteria even when diluted up to 800 times. He published his findings in 1929, but to very little notice.
The value of the substance was not realized until 1939, when Oxford University scientists happened onto its potential use as an antibiotic. But World War II was engulfing Europe, and Britain had neither the finances nor the facilities to expand the work.
The research was brought to the United States and to the fermentation experts at the Peoria lab. [See "From a Mold Springs and Industry."] Their task was to mass-produce the drug as quickly and as abundantly as possible. After a relatively short period of trial and error - and a chance discovery -
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