Riverside 5 Grand Opening

On Teusday, I was invited along with other member of the Fort Detrick Alliance to attend a Grand Openening of the new Riverside 5 building.  Riverside 5 is the first building that was erected as a part of SAIC/NCI-Frederick’s Riverside Research Park

This building, and the excitement that is created by expanding NCI within our little town, is just awesome

I lifted the previous pictures from Matan’s Riversidefive.com web site. I took a few more myself.

Wells Fargo Building on the other side of the Water Feature

You can’t actually see this building from Gas House Pike or Monocacy Blvd. because it’s obscured by the enormous ($300,000 sq ft) new Wells Fargo Building. This building is also amazingly large.

Also cool because the Research Park is going to have miles of trails, linking into the Monocacy Waterways bike paths.  If we still lived in Riverwalk, I’d literally be able to walk to work.

Already up and running, to feed the NCI with it’s lust for murine pieces and parts, is the new Charles River Labs facility.  I think it is something like a 50,000 sq foot vivarium, all state of the art.

If you look closely, you can see the new CRL facility through the rain

I think my favorite moment, aside from some really fancy food (like shooters of white chicken chili) was when George Lewis (from Ft Detrick Alliance) summed things up during his comments. He said something to the effect that on land that was once a chicken farm, we are building a Center with the sole purpose of curing cancer. And these cures (we all know that Cancer is not a single manifestation), will occur in our lifetime. Really mind blowing, when you think about it. And all of it happening in your own back yard.