No company better illustrates Pennsylvania's rapid growth in the biotech-pharmaceutical sector than Merck & Co., the Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based firm that's bringing 3,000 new jobs to Montgomery County in the Philadelphia area.
      With 69,300 employees and more than $40 billion in sales last year, Merck is at the forefront of research and development in medical science. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal noted that Merck's experimental AIDS vaccine is so promising that some scientists think it may hold the secret to curing the fatal disease.
      Such a discovery would represent the most significant medical science breakthrough since Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine in the 1950s -- another landmark event that occurred in Pennsylvania.
      "Pennsylvania's involvement in life sciences goes back to the Wistar Institute on the University of Pennsylvania's campus," says Matt Tunnell, executive deputy secretary for the Pennsylvania DCED. "Jonas Salk worked there and developed the polio vaccine. Merck has also been in Pennsylvania for a long time. Merck has a huge campus in West Pointe in Montgomery County. It has 10,000 people and has been there for five decades. Merck also has a significant facility in Danville, Pa., in the middle of the state."
      Tunnell says the Merck deal reflects "the collaboration between our universities and some of the top technology companies in their respective fields. Merck, for example, is working on research and work-force development with people at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, Temple University and many other research institutes.
      "There is a critical mass of pharmaceutical and life science research going on in Greater Philadelphia and throughout Southeast Pennsylvania," Tunnell adds. "Merck expects to attract 3,000 highly skilled workers to its campus in Montgomery County, and there is a critical mass of workers in the area who like to work at companies like Merck."
      Greater Philadelphia's pool of knowledge workers is bolstered by the fact that the 14-county Philadelphia-Wilmington (Del.)-Atlantic City (N.J.) metro area offers 83 colleges and universities with combined annual spending of $6.4 billion, according to the Pennsylvania Economy League. Together, these schools have a full-time-equivalent enrollment of 213,400 students, the seventh-highest concentration of college students in the country.
      More than 51,000 degrees are conferred by these schools each year, adding substantially to the region's base of talent. Moreover, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania recently was ranked as the top U.S. business school for the fourth year in a row by BusinessWeek magazine. The largest schools in the area are Temple (27,157 students) and Penn (21,724). Other major local universities include Villanova, Widener, St. Joseph's and La Salle.