Despite what her heirs claim, Johns Hopkins University doesn’t appear to be acting against the wishes of Elizabeth Banks in its effort to develop the family farm Banks sold to the university in 1989 as a scientific research and development campus that would include a high-rise commercial office park and a mass transit stop.

The farm is in the Life Sciences Center neighborhood between Rockville and Gaithersburg, which Montgomery County has designated as a health bioscience hub and once aggressively promoted as a “crown jewel” in branding the Interstate 270 high-tech corridor. Several large R&D concerns already exist within the hub.

The Hopkins plan would fit with the surrounding development and strengthen the county’s technology base. It represents the kind of forward-looking high-tech development the county must pursue and maintain to remain competitive in the region. The Planning Board has given Hopkins the go-ahead to map the campus, though it hasn’t fully approved the plan.

Banks heirs have filed suit in county Circuit Court seeking to stop Hopkins from moving forward with the multi-year proposal. They say it violates the deal that Banks signed with the university when she sold it her 130-acre farm at a deeply discounted price of $5 million — a deal that constituted a large gift to Hopkins.

In their complaint, the heirs state that Banks disliked developers and fended off their entreaties. She sold the farm to Hopkins on the proviso that it would build on the land only an institution dedicated to agricultural or academic uses, research and development, the delivery of health care services “or related purposes only, which uses may specifically include but not be limited to development of a research campus,” according to the agreement.

In their complaint, the heirs state that the Hopkins plan proposes not “a college campus consisting solely of buildings built for, and occupied by, JHU researchers, teachers, students and supporting personnel” but a “substantial commercial, entrepreneurial real estate development.”

In its motion to dismiss the complaint, Hopkins counters that a judge cannot rule against a development that hasn’t yet gotten off the drawing board. The university also points out that the heirs’ complaint is centered on the scale and density of the development, rather than its intended use, and that the original agreement does not restrict scale and density.

A judge is set to rule on Hopkins’ motion soon and the wording of the contract, and existing case law, are at the center of the dispute.

One can sympathize with the family without backing their effort to see this plan quashed. They believe they’ve been had.

But nearly 25 years have passed since Banks sold her farm to Hopkins and since then much has changed, including, to a great extent, the nature of higher education and the biotechnology industry, one of the pillars of the county’s Life Sciences Center. In a high-tech world, the sort of low-tech campus the heirs describe in their complaint simply wouldn’t be economically feasible nor would it serve a modern educational purpose. These days, universities and private industry partners must have strong collaborations to bring ideas, such as lifesaving gene-based drug therapies, from the laboratory bench into the marketplace.

When she sold her farm to Hopkins, Elizabeth Banks had her eye on the future. The plan Hopkins has proposed honors that vision by also looking ahead, rather than behind, and providing flexibility for responsible development.