A tall, broad-shouldered senior at North Dakota State University, Jeremy Lee is what's typically called a farm boy. For two generations, his family has raised cattle and grown wheat, canola, peas, and sunflowers on about 2,000 acres in central North Dakota. Lee himself has been tinkering with tractors since he was old enough to hold a wrench. Today, however, he spends most of his time at the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering in the pancake-flat and often frozen city of Fargo. Lee builds thumb-sized radio frequency sensors and is in his final semester of work toward a degree in electrical engineering.
At NDSU's Research Park, where the center is located, Lee's story is typical. Phil Boudjouk, a university vice president and one of the founders of the burgeoning research park, says farm boys (and girls) "have a built-in respect for machinery. They have designers' eyes. They're always seeing how to improve a piece of machinery. And they make mistakes once." These characteristics, along with an unusually strong work ethic, are so common, Boudjouk says, that faculty members have long fought over "who gets the farm kid" in a class.
Now it seems that people like Jeremy Lee will have opportunity to match their talent. The center and other technological projects in the state have recently received $225émillion in seed money, courtesy of US senator Byron Dorgan. For the past four years, the North Dakota Democrat has pushed aggressively to create a high tech corridor in the Midwest, running along the eastern edge of the Dakotas.
The senator is promoting one techénology in particular - radio frequency identification tags, which are essentially high-powered barcodes used by businesses that want to track their products. No larger than flecks of pepper, the current RFID chips are easily scanned and connected to databases that reveal all sorts of information: for example, when a steak was packaged and shipped, where it has traveled, what temperatures it has endured, and other information. It could even include the entire history of the steer - a boon to watchers of mad cow disease, as well as to gourmands. In fact, researchers have been working on electronic animal tags since the 1970s.
North Dakota's red-state politics also play to its RFID ambitions. In addition to their product-tracking capabilities, RFID systems can record and transmit all sorts of personal information, like which toll gates people pass through and what time they leave work. Not surprisingly, commercial efforts to trace consumer behavior have spawned an RFID opposition front, with activists pushing some state legislatures, such as California's, to consider bills banning RFID uses that might pose a threat to privacy. North Dakota, however, has never been a hotspot for ACLU-style activism, and it isn't likely to become one.
Currently, the university is happily working with several RFID-related firms, and one company, Silicon Valley-based Alien Technology, plans to break ground in spring on a plant in Fargo that will produce up to 10 billion electronic tags in its first year. This would turn Fargo into one of the largest RFID manufacturing centers in the world, creating a slew of jobs for people like Jeremy Lee.
- Todd Oppenheimer
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