Economy
Montgomery County is an important business and research center. It is the epicenter for biotechnology in the Mid-Atlantic region. Montgomery County is the third largest biotechnology cluster in the USA, holding the principal cluster and companies of large corporate size in the state. Biomedical research is carried out by institutions including Johns Hopkins University's Montgomery County Campus (JHU MCC), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Federal government agencies engaged in related work include the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
Many large firms are based in the county, including Discovery Communications, Coventry Health Care, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Host Hotels & Resorts, Travel Channel, Ritz-Carlton, Robert Louis Johnson Companies (RLJ Cos), Choice Hotels, MedImmune, TV One, BAE Systems Inc, Hughes Network Systems and GEICO.
Other U.S. federal government agencies based in the county include the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC), U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
Downtown Bethesda and Silver Spring are the largest urban business hubs in the county; combined, they rival many major city cores.
Read more about this topic: Montgomery County, Maryland
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“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)