Monthly Archives: February 2007

Howard be thy name

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A few posts ago I wrote about buying chemicals from Asia. I mentioned the weakness with shipping. But there are other snags in the system to contend with.  Recently I received a parcel of non-hazardous material that I bought from China. I have been trying to source this stuff for years and I finally found a candidate vendor. We already make the stuff, but we’re short on capacity.  The qual sample was a white granular product and was packed in thin plastic zip-lock sandwich baggies jammed into a used stereo speaker box (!!@#*!). Hell, the foam part for protecting the speaker was still in the box. OK, not smart. And it was mislabeled as some other product. That was the really dumb part.

Torqued about this, I fired off a grim and terse torpedo-gram expressing my shock and dismay at their poor judgement in these matters.  The vendor rapidly replied, exclaiming in much poorer English this time, that since it was a colorless solid product, they believed there would be “problems” shipping it to the USA.  Well, let’s see … hmmm.  It is TSCA listed, it is non-hazardous, no conceivable abuse issues, it is a salt so it won’t burn, but if you dropped a 200 kg drum of it on a cockroach, the cockroach might die.  Yeah, they thought it would be suspected as an illegal substance so they would be clever and ship it under another name. But it is ACS grade material completely innocent of any conceivable abuse potential.  So by being “clever” about it, they revealed their facility with underhandedness.  How can I go forward with a vendor willing to do this crap?

So, you might be tempted to think “Golly, they’re some pretty dishonest chaps”. Well, I’m not sure yet. They may be redeemable. Thank Howard, I myself have been given many second chances. It’s a karma thing. So we’ll inch along and see how they do on the next round. I suspect they’re just naieve in these matters.  Never attribute to malice what you can first explain by ignorance.

Moral of the story- just be honest and above board in all of your business dealings. Ya can’t fall off the floor.

Update:  It was suggested that this is actually a ploy by the exporter to get around import duties.  Well, I’ll happily pay the duties rather than monkey with this sort of thing. Crimony.

Chemical Logistics

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Any chemical company manager will have to admit that order fulfillment isn’t over until the product is in the hands of the customer.  Chemical manufacturing isn’t just about running reactions in big pots.  It’s about attracting a skilled, reliable, and safe work force. It is about building a supply chain for the timely delivery of raw materials. It is about executing the manufacture of products in spec the first time through. It is about warehousing raw mats and products and keeping the stream of wastes moving through the system.

Chemical manufacturing requires the careful management of cash flow by minimizing costs and maximizing profits. The business office must attend to receivables and collect payments in the most expeditious way that customers will tolerate. This is no different that any other manufacturing arena- sprockets, fur caps, or rocket motors.

One of the key jobs required of any chemical company is the matter of managing logistics.  That is, managing the timely transport of raw materials onto the site and the transport of products off the site. So how does this affect the chemist??

The tender shoot studying chemistry in their junior year of college may not know it yet, but if their path is in the fabulous world of business, then some aspect of logistics may be in their future.  What kind of chemist would need some knowledge of shipping? Well, project managers, sales managers, business development managers, plant managers, procurement managers, etc.  All these positions are often filled with chemists and all have to have some knowledge of this topic.  And how does one get this knowledge? Why, on-the-job training, of course.

If you have read many of my posts, you know that I tend to prattle on about this. There is a reason. It is not uncommon for a sales person or a business development manager to spend no small amount of time with a customer trying to work out how the product will be delivered.  The transport of materials is complicated in proportion to the hazard and the chemical sensitivity to decomposition. 

Let’s say that you are in the chemical business and you are just starting the custom mfg of a trialkylphosphine.  The customer will state that they want say, 100 kg, of their R3P with a list of specifications (e.g., 99% in R3P, oxides < 0.1 %, etc, Karl Fisher water 200 ppm) for their new product. The customer has accepted the quoted price and the delivery date. Hmmm. Price, delivery, and specs. Sounds like everything is in place.

So, the question then arises: How are you going to ship it? Glass bottles? Drums? Polyethylene totes? Whoops, the material is excruciatingly air sensitive, so charging and discharging the product will have to be done airlessly. Sounds like a cylinder is just the thing. But what are the materials of construction? I seem to recall that phosphines are ligands, so can we really use a steel cylinder? Soft steel? Stainless steel?

But there is yet another question.  Do we offer the phosphine neat or as a solution? If the neat R3P is a liquid, we can move it around airlessly and charge a cylinder with it. If it is a solid, then it could be a serious problem to transfer it from a filter to a shipping container. How will you or the customer actually handle it? This is the kind of detail that chemists might find themselves groping with. If it is a solid, the customer might have to consider receiving it as a solution in a non-interfering solvent.

Then the matter of transporting it arises. In the present epoch of security theatre, air transport of any quantity might be banned. So, surface shipment will be needed. The matter of heated shipment may arise if freezing or precipitation is an issue. The last thing anybody needs is a cylinder full of precipitated solids in it.  Remember, if you are shipping product in a heated trailer in the winter, you may have stiff competition from other customers who need to ship their lettuce or strawberrys. In some locations, reefer trucks as they are sometimes called may be in short supply.

OK. So you’ve specified a reefer trailer for heated transport of the goods. Let’s say that the product solution will crash out precipitate at 15 C. In the trailer everything is just fine. Fine that is until the shipper reaches a transfer point and moves the product out onto the loading dock where it sits in the freezing weather for a few hours waiting to be put into another trailer. Or it sits in unheated warehouse space for a while.

Eventually, the cylinder of R3P solution arrives and, sadly, has precipitated and won’t come out of the cylinder. So there you are. The customer is unhappy and you now face having to haul it back and recover the product. These are the kinds of problems that chemists on the business side (the plow horses) can find themselves dealing with. Of course, the R&D chemists (the show horses) are rarely bothered with such things.

In low gear

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Th’ Gaussling is in low gear this week due to extra-curricular activities. I’ve been in rehearsal since October for a play that opened last night- The Murder Room by Jack Sharkey. It’s community theatre, which is the only way a hack like myself would have had a chance. This is my first time on stage and it has been quite an experience. Acting is a lot like flying an airplane- it is exhilirating and terrifying all at the same time.  And like flying, you can fall from such a height that it takes a long time to smack into the ground.

Acting requires a type of learning that is rather different from learning chemistry. First, there is rote memorization. There is no escape from knowing your lines. With experience the actor can develop the character around the structure of the dialog. 

It is nowhere near as easy as it looks, and it does require a large investment in time and effort. But in the end, performing with other actors and pulling off a complicated show is quite satisying. 

Keystone Cops in Boston

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The mind still boggles at the recent cartoonish response of Boston authorities to the “viral” marketing campaign by Turner Broadcasting.  Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network evidently sponsored a targeted marketing campaign for its “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” program.  In doing so, their 20-something hirelings violated local sign ordinances by hanging electronic signs on bridges and that is where it stood until police were called and one of the displays was “disarmed” by a controlled bomb squad explosion.

The tipping point came when someone looked at the sign and saw a circuit board, wires and something that turned out to be a battery.  Evidently trained in the school of television drama bomb squadding, the officer on the scene triggered the terror response protocol.  God help us if this local constable ever looks in his computer and sees wires, capacitors, and other mechanisms.

I have witnessed much smaller versions of this first hand.  What appears to be an emergency leads to the arrival of the police and the fire department. This is the part where civil liberties fly out the window, and often enough, sensibility as well. The police establish a perimeter and secure the “scene”.  If the incident involves materials unknown to the police, then they will notify the fire department and then pull the trigger on the hazmat team.  If there is an object that seems suspicious, then they may trigger the bomb squad people. 

Obviously, the fine people who serve the public in the capacity of emergency response or law enforcement are trained and dedicated to their jobs. But what happens is that these people are given precious little latitude in their range of responses to “situations”.  What happens then is that they tend to do what is called erring on the side of safety, which means that when in doubt, call the bomb squad or the hazmat people. 

But when a situation leads to the arrival of the bomb squad, then the natural conclusion of the authorities is that whatever caused this response looks like a crime and should be so investigated. So, irrespective of the merits of the officer-on-the-scenes judgement, there might arise a presumption of foul play and the whole law enforcement apparatus is activated to supply evidence to the district attorney for the filing of charges on the alleged wrongdoer.  In fact one might cynically argue that, especially in these dubious circumstances, it is in the best interest of your career to be able to rationalize the release of these resources as a response to criminal activity. 

So, these two hapless fools who hung the signs in Boston are now at the pointy end of the law enforcement stick and the authorities seem to be bent on saving face through the exercise of grim and officious talk of terrorism. What a mess.

Astronaut burns up on re-entry to life

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The sad story of astronaut Lisa Nowak continues to unfold.  This thing seems to have many layers of complexity to it. It is interesting to see how the news media have approached it. People in the news business seem to have a set of tools in their bag from which they shape stories.  Some reporters are grilling NASA about fraternizing policy while others focus on the lurid detail about the diaper.  Perhaps someone will eventually make the connection with the Mercury program and how the astronauts wore diapers on these early flights.  It is just a concession to the pragmatics of long endurance travel. Pretty clever, really.  But regardless of her clever determination, using violence to resolve this kind of conflict has no valid excuse. 

It is rather painful to watch.

Moskva

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Here is a picture of a younger Gaussling with chums Leon, Joe, and Karl.  Of course, Leon was never quite “right” again after his tragic incident with the ice-axe. 

Trotsky

[Editors note: Many thanks to Les for the image “enhancement”. ]

Cheers!

A Bunch of Blarney

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I thought I’d disclose a picture of Th’ Gaussling for the one or two miscreants who might actually be interested.  I had the opportunity to visit Blarney Castle in Ireland a few years back. The Blarney stone is said to be part of the Stone of Scone given to Cormac McCarthy by Robert the Bruce of Scotland in 1314 as a reward for support in the Battle of Bannockburn. Yada yada. It is supposed to confer the power of eloquence.

I try not to think of all of the thousands of sweaty tourists that have hung backwards high in the air to kiss that clammy, dank stone. Yeah, I kissed it. Didn’t do a damned bit of good, though.

Blarney Stone

Cheers!

On Extracting Abstractions from the Abstracts

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One of the chores that must be done when developing a new technology is “Due Diligence” as applied to intellectual property.  In the fabulous world of industrial chemistry, there is an overlapping of the three great magisteria- Business, Chemical Science, and Law.  In order to get a new product or process on stream, we must find a line of sight through the many hoops and past the many gatekeepers of those magisteria that can obstruct our path the fame and fortune. 

First, allow me to pay homage to two great and wondrous database services- the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS).  They are the custodians of data generated by some of the most cantankerous and unruly people on earth- lawyers and chemists.  Their task is complex and effectively endless. 

In actually trying to do a reliable due diligence analysis, a searcher must ascertain that a proposed bit of IP does not conflict with claims in valid patents owned by others.  In a chemical IP search, one can divide the claim universe into 2 domains- composition of matter claims and process claims.  In the patent, the first sentence will state whether a composition is being claimed or that a process is being claimed. Some patents have both composition claims and process claims.

So here is the problem.  Let’s say that you are trying to determine whether or not you have the right to manufacture a particular molecule. This apparently simple question actually deconvolutes to two fundamental questions: 1) Is the composition of matter in the public domain? And, 2) are there claimed processes for it’s manufacture? 

There is a third domain and that relates to the use of the composition.  However, this does not impinge on the right to manufacture the material, just it’s use.

If the material is claimed as a 1) composition of matter in a valid patent, then you cannot lawfully make it or possess it (for commercial use, though precendence is being set for a bar on R&D use as well) without the permission of the assignee of the patent. Note that the owner of the patent is the assignee, not the inventor(s). If the composition of matter is not claimed, then it is in the public domain, assuming that you did not learn of it under trade secrecy. 

So, let’s say then that your target material is in the public domain. Now the question is 2); does your proposed method for its manufacture infringe on claimed methods? This may be a hard or expensive question to answer, and the reason is plain.  When you execute a search for IP issues related to a substance, you search path is limited to fields, key words, structures, CASRN’s, etc. that are flagged in the major databases. 

A CAS search on a given compound will lead to patent families that mention the compound, its preparation, or its use. But you have no way of knowing whether the patent reference claims the composition, its preparation, or its use.  It could very well be that there are no claims pertaining to the compound of interest- it was just cited as an example of some sort.

A CAS search is highly accurate in terms of the focus on a particular compound.  However, a USPTO search is not. A chemical search of the USPTO public database (USPTO.gov) is pretty much limited to a search for specific character strings.  It is possible to narrow down the scope of a search by concentrating on classification numbers, but I have never been convinced of its thoroughness.

After all of this set up, here is my point.  The problem we all face in doing our IP due diligence is that there is no direct means for determining from an indication in a database search report whether or not a composition is in the public domain. A CAS search will not yield a clear yes or no, and the USPTO database search only retrieves hits that have the requested strings.  Despite the advances in database technology, the user still has to collect all of the patent citations pertaining to the material and sift through them and interpret the claim language. 

Wouldn’t it be useful to the public if an applicant for a US patent were required to collate the claimed compositions for uplink into a database?  With such a “field” in a CAS or Beilstein search, you could tell in an instant if the composition was claimed. The same argument holds true for processes.  At present, the “retrievability” of claimed art is poor.

Patent attorneys are likely to object along the following arguments: not all patents that you retrieve from a search on CAS or USPTO will be valid.  Some patents will have expired naturally, others will have expired for non-payment of fees, and still others will have serious weaknesses that will only be apparent from an examination of the prosecution history as revealed in the file wrapper.  Abandonment may be difficult to detect for abstracting services, as would flaws in the prosecution as documented by the wrapper.

Another objection that is unlikely to be openly identified is the matter of clarity.  There is may be advantage conferred to assignees when a claim is a bit fuzzy.  This may afford some manuevering room during an infringement action, though it might be hard to say who the beneficiary would really be. I would estimate that whomever had the most persuasive attorneys would prevail.

It would be interesting to hear from others about this matter.