Monthly Archives: July 2012

Thoughts on Academia

The blog post by Terran Lane of the University of New Mexico provides a good example of the frustrations in academics today. Much of this is well plowed soil. I link to it because I think he is spot on about more than a few things.

The availability of external funding for the last 30 years has equipped American colleges and universities with a great deal of equipment and facilities. The availability of funding for grad students and post-docs has energized a vast educational complex that has come to depend on external grant money to maintain built up infrastructure. Naturally when an institution expands in good times, it finds itself top heavy in overhead when the good times end.

Ambitious people step forward when presented with the opportunity to grow programs and institutions when times are cash rich. But when the cash influx begins to taper off, these same people find themselves in the position of having to decomission or dismantle parts of the very organization they helped to build. It is hard for people in any circumstance to feel like they are moving forward when they have to make do with less.

One response to restricted university resources is to increase competition for teaching positions and tenure. Candidates with the best potential for winning grants are highly prized in any candidate search. The result of this is that professors today are burdened by administrative expectations in the hunt for resources in order to maintain close to what they already have.

Friends at PUI institutions are also feeling the heat, possibly due in part to the rise in undergraduate research programs that took off in the 1980’s. Undergraduate research in chemistry, at least, has grown into an expectation rather than a plus. This brought the buzz saw of the grant machine into the grassy quads of many quiet institutions.

Certainly no untenured prof is going to throttle down their scholarly activity for the greater good of science funding. Faculty will continue to struggle with this as long as grants are a major metric in rank and tenure.

Which brings me to my final point. Scientific knowledge as national treasure. I am sifting through Chemical Abstracts Service data bases searching for something nearly every day. This resource of ours, scholarly and pragmatic knowledge, is one of the crown jewels of human civilization. It is the collective contribution of people and institutions going into the distant past and across the curved surface of our world. We should cherish it for what it is- an archive of achievement, a repository of knowledge for application to future challenges, and a representation of the best of what we are capable of.

The notion that academia is the apex of the life intellectual has never been entirely true. You do not have to be in industry for very long before it becomes quite clear that there are a great many smart and creative people outside of academia. People who become professors are people who are in love with the very idea of the university and of higher education. We must find a way to allow research active faculty to throttle down the grant cycle just a bit so they may throw their energies into serving their institutions in the traditional manner. By service to their students, to scholarship, and to the advance of civilization.

That said, it seems embarrassingly obvious to say that our academic institutions are a critical part of our civilization past, present, and future. But today our institutions are in peril of substantial decay if left to antagonistic legislators and fulminating demagogues bent on terminating programs in the name of social reconstruction.

We know how to operate our university/research complex. Absent some of the mania in the horse race for grants, perhaps we can offer a bit more student contact with professors. A BA/BS degree must be understood to mean that a graduate has absorbed knowledge, sharpened reasoning ability, accrued some judgement, and has developed a professional demeanor that can only come from the personal interaction between people. We should expect from our institutions that a professor is a professor, not a shift supervisor.

On the Merry Path of Calorimetry

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I enjoy working with our RC1 reaction calorimeter. As we get more experience with thermal profiles of reactions, the utility of this instrument is made more evident. The Mettler-Toledo RC1 can be used to follow the heat evolution of a reaction for safety purposes, and/or it can be used to narrow in on optimum feed rates of reactants.

What is next on the agenda is to determine the heat transfer coefficient(s) and wetted heat transfer surface areas in selected reactors in order to gauge the upper heat load boundary that can be managed safely. There are many variables to contend with. Inevitably, one has to pick a finite range of operating parameters to evaluate. Agitation rate, fill level, and heat transfer medium are variables to take into account.

So, down the merry path we go, learning more and more about applied thermodynamics and chemical engineering. I can dig it.

In my experience with people in different organizations in the context of training and expertise, I have come to notice that employees can be partitioned into two camps. There are those who wait to be trained and there are those who will not wait to for it. As a rule, scientists and engineers are driven by curiosity and not a small portion of competitive spirit. This group will engage in self-study to acquire the necessary skills to push back the limits of their abilities.

An instrument like the RC1 requires that the user be familiar with the intimate details of the chemical transformation. It is possible to alter the experiment profile on the fly, and that is not the work of a pure analyst following SOP’s. A chemist experienced in experimental synthesis with a broad background in material phenomena and descriptive chemistry is one who can steer the instrument and tease out key subtleties.

I recently had a reaction mixture in the RC1 that formed a slush at low temperature. At this temperature the heat flow trace was extremely irregular. The reaction mass showed little visible sign of mixing. Addition of reactant was followed by large magnitude, short coupled, exothermic swings. Apparently the heat of reaction was being released on a relatively small top portion of the reaction mass and eventually swirling towards the heat sensor strip with little dilution, giving exaggerated heat flow indications. With a Tr increase of 20 ºC and a higher mixing frequency, the mass began to thin a bit giving a vortex. The wild heat excursions disappeared.

What I take from this experience is that control problems might arise as a result of poor mixing leading to temperature or feed control inputs that are exaggerated as a result of being out of phase with the state of the reaction mass. An economic consequence might arise in the form of overly conservative metering of reactant, adding extra plant hours to the cost.

The concentration effects due to poor mixing can lead to localized enthalpic overheating and potential disturbances in the composition profile. A reaction mixture with high viscosity or density in a solvent with low tensile strength (i.e., diethyl ether) can lead to cavitation and further exacerbation of mixing problems.

A poorly mixing slurry of reactive components in a low boiling solvent is a bad combination. Especially when the reactor is filled to afford low headspace. A temperature excursion can exceed the boiling point and cause the thick mixture to develop into a foam which can expand into the headspace or beyond. This is the realm of heterogeneous flow and your emergency venting system may not be designed for such flows. This is one of the many reasons that some operations define an operating temperature policy relating to the reaction temperature and the boiling point of the reaction solvent.

It is worth pointing out that process intensification is likely to lead to higher power densities (W/kg) in the reaction mass as well as solubility problems that can cause poor mixing and heat transfer. The RC1 can help the process chemist flesh out the merits of process intensification.

Aurora Shooting

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At some point we Americans are going to have to address the peculiar gun fetish that marks the national character. Between the NRA and the entertainment industry, we have way too much fascination with firearms and destruction for our own good. When citizens aren’t being entertained by gunplay on TV and the movies, more than a few citizens are out shooting at other citizens or the police, invading foreign countries with guns, cheering bloodlust at National Rifle Association rallies, giving heartfelt testimonials to our devotion to the 2nd amendment, watching reality television programming about gunsmiths and their frothy zeal for firepower, daring people to wrench our guns from our cold dead hands, equipping our municipal law enforcement with militaristic firepower, selling armaments all over the world, and training our young soldiers to be ever more effective in the killing arts. Obviously soldiers have to kill effectively, but do we put enough energy into avoiding battle with smarter foreign policy and thus making fewer veterans?

All of the bravado about our national ability to kill with pinpoint accuracy from anywhere a drone can fly has the effect of normalizing or sanitizing the act of killing. Firearms and conflict are big business and presently politicians who stand up to these interests are unelectable. Is this really a desirable consequence of the market- to allow gun violence to thrive as a side effect of the arms industry and laissez faire legitimized by the 2nd amendment? Perhaps the US constitution is inadequate to provide for the conduct of civilized society with it’s 18th century publication date. Why do constitutional guarantees like due process only apply to citizens? How is it “OK” to have a Gitmo? Who is this great nation that has extraordinary rendition?

Gun control really comes down to urge control. These pitiful, fearful people who have armed themselves to the teeth in their basements aren’t going to lose their guns anytime soon. Hell no. There isn’t an ounce of political courage in the entire continent to cause that to happen. Instead, we are likely to tighten the civil arms race as the rigor mortis of paranoia stiffens our imaginations against new ways to conduct civilized society.

We need to consider that gun bravado of all sorts is substantially a form of violence bravado and is a disfigurement. Mature peace loving adults should reject gun and other violence as entertainment and as a normal fact of life. More to the point, we should challenge Obama and Romney to identify exactly how they will act to turn gun violence around in this country. Greater law enforcement is not the answer, nor is the imposition of more severe punishment. We have to find a way for people to make money waging peace. Right now, there is too much profit in armanment and conflict.

We cannot allow the Aurora shooting to become normalized by a quiet passing into the murky depths of history. We, all of us, should push back against this disfigurement on our civilization. One mass killing is one too many. I’ll be volunteering with campaign work monday to put better elected officials in office. What will you be doing to turn this around?

Why does Russia seem to support the Syrian government?

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Why does Russia vote the way it does in the Security Council of the United Nations in relation to Syria? Could it be that they are anxious to protect their only Mediterranean naval base located in Tartus? I’m sure this fact plus a great many skeletons in the closet from past activities based in Syria or in support of Syria over the decades contributes to their position. The total collapse of Syrian society would likely have an adverse effect on their naval operations in Tartus as well as the loss of a significant diplomatic investment accumulated over time. Of course they are reticent to back the overthrow of the al-Assad regime.

China is nothing if not consistent. They seem to vote against all measures critical of existing governments, irrespective of the atrocities in play. This is pure self interest and I’m guessing it is to telegraph the notion to an internal audience that rebellion is never acceptable. Pretty obvious, I suppose.

Why not encourage Iran and other states to develop thorium-based nuclear power?

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It is a crying shame that we (the rest of the world) did not think to encourage Iran and other states to develop thorium-based nuclear power many years ago. The thorium fuel cycle provides nuclear-powered steam generation, but is largely absent the use of fissile isotopes in the cycle which may be used for nuclear proliferation. Thorium-232 is more abundant that uranium-(235 + 238) isotopes and does not require isotopic separation as uranium does.

The great exploration boom in progress with rare earth elements would facilitate thorium supply. Thorium and uranium are commonly found in rare earth ores and, to the dismay of extractive metallurgists since the Manhattan Project, these elements tend follow along in rare earth extraction process. The isolation of thorium was developed long ago. Point is, since so many rare earth element extraction process streams are either in operation or are pending, now is the time to accumulate thorium.

At present however, thorium is a troublesome and undesired radioactive metal whose isolation and disposal can be quite problematic. The best process schemes partition thorium away from the value stream as early in the process as possible and channel it into the raffinate stream for treatment and disposal in the evaporation pond.

The specific activity of natural thorium is 2.2 x 10^-7 curies per gram (an alpha emitter). The specific activity of natural uranium is 7.1 x 10^-7 curies per gram. Alpha emitters pose special hazards in their handling. Dusts are a serious problem and workers must be protected especially from inhalation or ingestion. While alpha’s are not difficult to shield from, their low penetration through ordinary materials or even air makes them a bit more challenging to detect and quantitate relative to beta’s and gamma’s. In spite of the mild radioactivity of thorium, managing the occupational health of workers is known technology in practice in the nuclear industry.

Regrettably, most of the world’s nuclear power infrastructure is geared to uranium and plutonium streams. Thorium, the red-headed stepchild of the actinides, is thoughtlessly discharged to the evaporation ponds or to the rad waste repository- wherever that is- to accumulate fruitlessly. If we’re digging the stuff up anyway, why not put it to use? It is a shame and a waste to squander it.

Corporate person Pratt & Whitney provides attack helicopter technology to China

CERN to make announcement Wednesday, July 4, 1012

USPTO to open new regional offices

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Attention inventors! I just received this from a friend who is a patent examiner. The USPTO is expanding to 4 new locations around the country.

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USPTO to Open Four Regional Patent Offices The Commerce Department and USPTO announced plans today to open regional USPTO offices in or around Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley, in addition to the already-announced first satellite office to open July 13 in Detroit. The four offices will function as hubs of innovation and creativity, helping protect and foster American innovation in the global marketplace. They will also help the agency attract talented IP experts throughout the country who will work closely with entrepreneurs to process patent applications, reduce the backlog of unexamined patents, and speed up the overall process, allowing businesses to move their innovation to market more quickly and to create new jobs.

Selection of the four sites was based upon a comprehensive analysis of criteria including geographical diversity, regional economic impact, ability to recruit and retain employees, and the ability to engage the intellectual property community. The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA), signed into law by President Obama in September, requires the USPTO to establish regional satellite locations as part of a larger effort to modernize the U.S. patent system over the next three years.

Since the passage of the AIA, the USPTO and the Department of Commerce have been committed to an open, robust, and fair site selection process based on extensive public input. In addition to reviewing more than 600 public comments in response to a public Federal Register Notice, USPTO officials met with hundreds of state and local officials, congressional delegations, and policy leaders. The selection team developed a model to evaluate more than 50 Metropolitan Statistical Areas based on the previously stated criteria to assess operational cost and feasibility, ability to improve patent quality, and ability to employ U.S. veterans.

The USPTO will develop concepts of operations and best practices for the three newly-announced locations based on lessons learned from the Elijah J. McCoy Detroit Office over the coming months and years. While the Detroit office will employ approximately 120 individuals in its first year of operations, including patent examiners and administrative law judges, the USPTO is working to develop specific hiring plans for the other sites.

The agency will also seek to identify and maximize the unique regional strengths of all four offices to further reduce the backlog of patent applications and appeals.

“By expanding our operation outside of the Washington metropolitan area for the first time in our agency’s 200-plus year history, we are taking unprecedented steps to recruit a diverse range of talented technical experts, creating new opportunities across the American workforce,” said USPTO Director David Kappos. “These efforts, in conjunction with our ongoing implementation of the America Invents Act, are improving the effectiveness of our IP system, and breathing new life into the innovation ecosystem.”

The Chemical Entrepreneur, Part 3.

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In previous posts I have written about aspects of starting and running a chemical business. I do not pretend to cover all views on this matter. It has been my experience that entrepreneurs and inventors are a thick-headed lot who often see the world through colored and distorted optics. To such folk I can only offer this- Cash flow is life. Have something to sell right away if not sooner.

For everyone else, a chemical business can take many forms. Choose your business model carefully. Here are some examples of general business models-

Distribution or catalog model. Buy in bulk or semi-bulk and repackage for resale. This ranges from specialties to commodities. Selling samples means that you can sell under the R&D exemption under TSCA. You may have noticed that R&D quantities from supply houses are almost always labeled with “R&D Only.” This means that the sample is exempt from TSCA regulation.
Formulation. Buy raw materials and blend to produce your products. Sell your own brand or under a customer’s brand. This is often the world of commodities.
Tolling business. A toller is a processor for hire. A toller takes a customer’s raw materials and processes them in a specified manner to produce a product. In tolling, the operator agrees to produce to a specification and yield agreed to by contract.
Commodity scale production. Process raw materials to produce a product that competes with other manufacturers of the product. Commodity buying decisions are made on the basis of price and contractual terms. it is commonly a high volume, low unit margin operation. Products pricing typically very sensitive to raw material costs.
Pharmaceutical manufacture. Highly specialized and capital intensive. Specialized skill sets are required. Cash needed for long dry spells during development. Expect to turn over control to VC’s sooner than later. This is the realm of VC/Esq/MD/PhD/MBA’s- an especially loathsome combination of buggering pencil-necks. I would rather roll naked in broken glass wetted down with Tabasco than try starting a pharmaceutical business, but that is just my own bias.
Specialty/custom synthesis. Manufacture custom chemicals for customers who will use them in their own process. This is usually done under a secrecy agreement on a spot basis or under contract. Specialty products may be from the public domain or may be the result of proprietary processing. They are “specialty” because they are low demand, require specialized skills, have particular specs, or are below the radar screen of other manufacturers. This kind of production may take you into the EPA TSCA regulatory realm, depending on the end use of the substances. TSCA space is a murky space where you’ll likely need a full-time regulatory staff of specialists. This kind of regulatory compliance can dramatically extend lead times for delivery.
Hybrid catalog/specialty/custom. Aldrich Chemical started in this category. They were a catalog operation that was highly opportunistic. The hoods and kilo labs that filled their catalog collection could also be used to do custom or specialty manufacture. Alfred Bader’s great strength as an entrepreneur was his total commitment to getting the customer what they wanted. Bader’s method was to find out what chemists wanted and make it available to them. The secret to the catalog business is variety. Grow the collection and raise prices 5 % every year.
Analytical services. Analysis work doing water, soil, fly ash, mineral, elemental, concrete, feed, fuel samples etc. You need to have approved methods and certifications to sign off on many analyses. In this business, you must keep the instruments going night and day to the greatest extent possible. The good news is that advanced degrees are not often needed and fresh college grads often flock to this kind of work. Turnover may be high, though. Not everyone takes to analytical work.

I have had numerous opportunities to speak with chemists, often chemistry professors or university tech transfer folks, about their interest in commercializing an invention or exploiting an opportunity. Many of the ideas have related to reagents and catalysts. Professor X has developed a catalyst that performs some transformation in a unique manner and the prof is naturally interested in the commercial possibilities. Prof X has filed a patent application through the university tech transfer office.

Let’s say that Prof X has a new late transition metal complex that, say, performs some transformation. The professor has a good patent attorney so the composition of matter of the catalyst is claimed bearing mono and bidentate pnictogen ligands with C1-C30 alkyl, aryl, alkylaryl, arylalkyl, fluorinated alkyl, fluorinated aryl, alkylsiloxanes, arylsiloxanes, and on and on. Multi-dimensional Markush ligand space is claimed as well as a whole universe of chiral variants. Prof X has also claimed methods of catalyst preparation as well.

Here is what Prof X controls. Nothing. If Prof X is the inventor but not the assignee, then Prof X has turned over control of the invention to the University as is often the case. Maybe the good Prof gets royalties personally or for the Prof’s research. This depends entirely on what Prof X had negotiated with the university. Some universities make a lot of royalty money from the patent portfolio. A great many do not.

Starting a business based on a transformation using patented compositions or processes can be a tough sell. For established products, you have to convince a customer why they should take their lined-out process and change it. Even worse, and this is a common deal killer, your customer’s customer may require lengthy and expensive validation. And, you need a good answer to the question the end user will ask- What kind of price can we expect as a result of this change? Better to supply product or technology during the development stage when changes are not so problematic.

The other big negative to selling proprietary reagents or processes is negotiating the terms and pricing. From the customers perspective, adopting your composition or process means that smack in the middle of their process train they have to manage a licensed technology with extra paper work and auditing. This is a big problem with catalysts. Many of the newer catalysts you see in the Aldrich or Strem catalogs are proprietary and must be used under a license agreement. Nothing stirs the creative juices like the desire to avoid paying royalties by finding white space in a patent or inventing a new process.

Having been involved in such license negotiations, I can say that you need to have a lawyer looking over your shoulder while you consider the terms and conditions. These agreements often entail upfront fees and a sliding scale of pricing based on usage. Some IP owners want a piece of your gross product sales resulting from the use of their technology. An annual audit may be expected as well. It’s like having raccoons in your picnic basket.

Instead of trying to convince the world that your reagent, catalyst, or additive is worth adopting, why not find a product that your technology enables? When you manufacture and ship a product, you can earn profits on the mass produced. You can use your technology to produce a portfolio of fine or custom products. Better yet, why not just find out what customers want. You have 110 or more years of public domain chemistry available to you in Chemical Abstracts there for the taking. Maybe you can even sell some of your composition to customers for their development work.

If you have no interest or capital for starting a commodity production facility, then you have to consider the other end of the spectrum- low volume, high margin specialty or fine chemicals. But how do you find products? Well, that is a problem. For the rank outsider, getting a clue as to what the market is about can be difficult. Commerce specifics in specialties or custom chemicals are usually confidential information.

An important consideration for the entrepreneur is to focus on your strengths and knowledge of the markets in your area of specialty. Low volume, high value products require smaller equipment and accordingly, smaller entry costs. I would encourage someone who wants to start up a synthesis business to avoid the one-act pony scenario. There is strength in having a diverse collection of product offerings. Multiple products and multiple customers bring greater stability. Your synthesis business should be a 3-ring circus of multiple simultaneous performances to a diverse audience.

In regard to products to start with, phone or visit purchasing managers to make an introduction and talk about your capabilities. Walk a trade show like Informex or ChemSpec to get an idea of what the market is doing. Many purchasing managers at chemical companies have a list of troublesome compounds they are trying to source. Keep your processes as close to earth, air, fire, and water as possible and try to keep your vessels full, even if the margins are low. It is important to have some good history with customers.

There is more to life than pharmaceuticals. It is possible to have a productive life entirely outside of medicinal chemistry. Consider CVD or organic semiconductor chemicals. This field is famous for stringent purity specs. But often the users do their own polishing.

Read patents from 20 years ago to see what technology is coming into the public domain. Scan recent patents in the USPTO’s Patent Gazette to see what potential customers are doing. Often, reactions in the specification are not claimed in the patent. Who knows, the procedure may actually work.

Search the USPTO for key words relating to chemistry you want to do. You’ll find assignees who represent potential customers. Maybe they’re looking for someone to take over preparation of materials related to their technology. Just because a chemical company patents a composition or process doesn’t mean that they want to practice it. They just want to control it. Look around.

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