Murdock Research Institute Acquires $5M in Micro-Imaging Equipment

KANNAPOLIS, N.C. — Billionaire David Murdock is spending some $5 million to add cutting-edge imaging technology to the David H. Murdock Research Institute.

The Institute, which is part of the North Carolina Research Campus Murdock is building in Kannapolis, is acquiring light microscopy and biological imaging systems from Carl Zeiss MicroImaging.

The equipment will be incorporated into the Institute’s Integrated Microscopy Laboratory.

“The high contrast and high resolution of these microscopes is fantastic, especially the new state of the art confocal microscopes which will allow us to see three dimensional images so clearly that ideas and processes we could not fully understand up to this point will be obvious,” said Steve Leath, vice president of research for the University of North Carolina System.

The UNC System and Duke University are partners with Murdock in building the campus.

Last year, Murdock invested $900,000 in a nuclear magnetic resonance imager.

The Carl Zeiss company also will place a full-time consultant at the campus to support the equipment. The Institute will become a testing site for Carl Zeiss equipment.

“The Carl Zeiss instrumentation, when integrated with other capabilities of the core lab, will allow us to study and understand complex biological systems at a level that could not be imagined even a few years ago,” said Steve Lommel, a member of the Institute board .