Well, I have a great loyalty to Huntsville, Alabama, which is my home, and I’ve got to plug it a little bit: Huntsville is a really special community. It had twelve-thousand-five-hundred people when I moved there. Over the next two years it grew to two-hundred-fifty-thousand and these were all space scientists from all over the world; engineers and everything that got us to the moon and so forth. So, the town is a hybrid mixture of scientists from everywhere and it’s just a special community. We have, I like to say, it’s a community where everybody roots for everybody else’s success. There is just a positive attitude. There’s more engineers per capita in Huntsville Alabama than any city in the world and engineers are problem-solvers and we just love to attack problems. We’re located, The HudsonAlpha Institute, is located in the second largest technology park in the nation; forty-four hundred acres, twenty-seven-thousand scientists working on – in the park. Most of them are in rocket-science and telecommunications. My passion is biotechnology and I wanted to bring biotechnology to Huntsville, because it really wasn’t there until I started my company earlier.

Jim Hudson scientist and businessmen who founded Research Genetics in 1987, the company that made synthetic DNA. He received a dual major in chemistry and physics from the University of Alabama and studied molecular biology. His company was very successful and dominated the market for synthetically made DNA in USA. That allowed Research Genetics to play a main role in the Human Genome Project. Company was sold in 2000 to Invitrogen.

Jim Hudson is co-founder of HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville. Together with his wife he formed a biodefense company, Concero Scientific.

More information: Technology Alabama