No CEO or plant manager can deny enjoying hearing the words, “Yes, we can,” from employees. The same is true for life-sciences industry calls for training and other help from the professionals at the N.C. Community College System’s BioNetwork. Many of BioNetwork’s staff are industry veterans whose can-do attitude toward the challenges faced by life-sciences companies continues to garner statewide and national attention.

In May, Torti, 60, departed Winston-Salem and his job as director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center for the Washington, D.C., suburbs to take up a new position at the FDA. An experienced clinical researcher specializing in urologic oncology, he will oversee research efforts and launch a fellowship program created, like his job, by the FDA Amendments Act of 2007.

Martin Posey, chairman of the Department of Biology and Marine Biology at UNC Wilmington, is among a handful of scientists working to restore the Tar Heel oyster population, estimated to be 5% to 10% of what it was in the early 1900s.

The call came early in the morning — 4:45, to be exact — but for Oliver Smithies, it wasn’t a minute too soon. For years, colleagues had told the UNC professor he was up for the Nobel Prize in medicine for his ground-breaking research in genetics, but as the years went by with no word from Sweden, he learned to ignore the rumors. When the call finally came last October, it was “a feeling of relief as much as anything else. A feeling of, well, that’s good. That’s finished.”

When Stan Eskridge wanted to help Tom Fischer make an inexpensive bandage that quickly stops bleeding, he turned to his connections. “You can’t be a North Carolina native and not know somebody in the textile industry,” Eskridge, 65, says. His friends helped find the materials to develop Stasilon, a bandage woven from bamboo yarn and glass filament, approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in September.

It’s the way Moose Drug Co. does business that has changed, radically in some ways. “When Mrs. Jones comes to us today, she’s not just getting a bottle of pills,” says Joe Moose, 43, who with his older brother owns the company. “She’s getting time with Whit and time with me. She’s getting help in order to get the most from her prescriptions. We’re selling health care.”

Even in the South, where the mythological is never very far from the real, the memory of the feudal county boss is but a scant echo of an earlier time. Ours is a modern society now, with all the trappings of democracy, economic equality and self-determination. We are the lords of our own lives, in a way that our forebears never were. What to make, then, of the influence and power two elderly men have wielded over a single suburban county in North Carolina?

Christy Shaffer can thank the board for knowing her better than she knew herself. With products on the market and a rich pipeline, Inspire Pharmaceuticals is one of the few true successes of the Triangle biotech scene. But without the board’s trickery, she never would’ve become its boss.

If you want to start a high-tech or science-heavy business in the South, there’s Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and everyone else, says Andrew Holton, assistant director for research at The Program on Public Life at UNC Chapel Hill. Those states lead the pack, often by wide margins, in most of the conventional indicators of innovation and risk-taking. Holton led a study of entrepreneurial climates in 12 Southern states.

Turner Johnson is the bravest, toughest kid I know. The son of our design/production director, he was born 12 years ago this month with a benign tumor that tethered his spinal cord to the base of his backbone. When he was 3 months old, surgeons cut it loose but couldn’t remove the growth, a glob of fatty tissue entwining itself around major nerves.

In the 14 years since starting Icagen, Kay Wagoner, 58, has seen more ups and downs than Keith Richards’ blood-alcohol level.

What does writing code have to do with the genetic code? Maybe nothing, but that’s not the reason Red Hat Inc. is opening an office at the state’s newest biotechnology hot spot.

The day Trimeris Inc. announced it was profitable should have been a happy one. But two other announcements that same day left analysts wondering whether the 14-year-old Morrisville drug developer has much of a future.