Author Archives: gaussling

About gaussling

Gaussling is a senior scientist in the chemical business. He occasionally breaks glassware, spreads confusion and has been known to generate new forms of hazardous waste. Gaussling also digs aerospace, geology, and community theatre.

A Homily on Extractive Metallurgy

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In the last 6 months I have learned a bit of what extractive metallurgy is about. One of my projects involves isolating an element from an ore where the desired element is one of many minor constitutents. What is important here is the term “minor constituents”.  When the desired element is a minor constituent, then one necessarily faces the prospect of processing large quantities of mass.

Processing large quantities of mass requires that the material and energy inputs used in the process must be very inexpensive. Except for gold, you have to start thinking of heat as a kind of reagent that can be applied to make things happen. The lucky circumstance with gold is its affinity for cyanide in an oxygenated aqueous environment.

It is a very interesting and worthy challenge to start with rock and contrive to remove purified products from it. Half of the fun is working with the engineers and metallurgists. They have a very different perspective of industry than a stiff like me who has always relied on Aldrich for “raw materials”. I have had to recalibrate a bit. You don’t meet people like this at ACS meetings.

I have spent more than a little time digging into extractive metallurgy from the 19th century.  A good deal of fairly sophisticated technology was worked out long ago for many metals on the periodic table.  Mostly, what has changed between the metallurgy of yesteryear and today is that we now consider fairly low grade ore as economically viable. 

The tailings of yesterday will become the ore of tomorrow. It just depends on the value.  When you drive around the gold and silver mining districts in the Colorado Mineral Belt, the tailings that you see from the road have most likely been worked over at least once.

The View

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I don’t know where others sit in the chemical industry, but the view from my chair seems encouraging. The market is abuzz with activity. The chemical industry and the people who run it are, well, rather stodgy.  So to see lots of rfq’s flying around the ether is encouraging.

Every day I wake up and thank whomever will listen that I did not go into pharmaceuticals. There is a vibrant world outside of pharma and I’m glad to be in it. Those of you in pharma, I’m honestly happy for you. I’m relieved that so many bright people dig that brutal business.  But for me, I’m glad I let that bus go right on by.  The public corporation GMP life is not for me.

I have a PhD and a post doc in asymmetric organic synthesis. It was interesting at the time and admittedly hard to let go of, but I have few regrets today. If I’d have stayed in academics, I be teaching my 18th year of 2nd semester organic or (*gulp*) general chemistry and doing battle over meager and diminishing departmental budgets. That is, if I had survived student evaluations. What dipshit thought of student evaluations as a tenure and promotion metric?  The little punks should be grateful to be sitting in the classroom. Well, ok. That was a bit harsh.

I think the best part of having a background in synthesis is that you become very mechanistically oriented. Latent and blatant functional groups bristle and are pregnant with possibility. The ability to make a good stab at what happens when two molecules interact is a very powerful thing and I’m grateful for what little I can do.  And if you think that is false modesty, just try to go back and make sense again out of ligand field theory or lanthanide chemistry. Chemistry is a big field and much of it remains unfamiliar.

ACS Meetings

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Now that my abstract for a talk at the upcoming ACS meeting in Denver has been accepted, the reality of it has sunk in. I still have lots of data to collect and sense to be made out of it.

I resolved a few years ago that I wouldn’t go to an ACS meeting again unless I had something to present. It is very depressing to go to one of these extravaganzas and not be able to participate. One of the down sides of generating proprietary information is that you rarely get to present it at meetings to the scientific community. A negative side effect is that it appears to students and our academic colleagues that nothing much is being done in industry if the lion’s share of results are being presented by the university research establishment.

XRF Up Close

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Had the chance to visit a lab today with an XRF and a GDMS. It was very interesting. Even though I’m an organikker by training, I have to say that I really dig haunting other parts of the periodic table. Organic chemists are spoiled by the splendid richness of multinuclear, multidimensional NMR.  But when you stray from C,H,N, & O, composition and structure can become much more problematic.

The XRF samples were prepared as a lithium borate fusion in a Pt mold in the muffle furnace. The vitreous buttons were then placed in the instrument sample station. One of the problems with XRF, like any other kind of spectroscopy, is the occasional interfering peak.  But, like the famous British philosopher M. Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want.

The GDMS was a sight. This instrument is sensitive to sub ppm levels all over the periodic table. At this level, just about everything shows up to some extent. The concept of purity becomes muddied a bit, at least for mining samples. For most things there aren’t good standards at this level. You have to trust in the linearity of the instrument and be happy with 30 % error.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy Lifter

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SpaceX has announced their Falcon Heavy lift rocket. It consists of two liquid fuel rockets astride a longer center rocket. Each of the three rockets has 9 Merlin rocket engines.  SpaceX claims it will lift 53 metric tons into low earth orbit- twice the payload of the Space Shuttle and more than twice that of the Delta IV.   Depending on configuration a launch will cost between $80 and $125 million. 

This seems to be real progress for the space business.

DARPA Investigating On-Board Wii-Based Flight Control System

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April 2, 2011, Guapo, Arizona–  Investigators working under a DARPA grant are experimenting with an advanced flight control system using Wii technology.  Professor Laurentz Fine, titular director of Pultroon University’s Ornithopter Institute (PUOI), disclosed results to the public today on recent aerospace advances at PUOI. 

Professor Fine disclosed that important breakthroughs have been made in a new type of flight control system design that may influence how aircraft of the future are flown.  The prototype devised at PUOI uses motion and position sensors placed on various locations on the arms, hands, and head of the flight crew.  Vibration sensors on the throat are fitted to to the pilots detect the low frequencey growling sounds used for powerplant control input.

According to Professor Fine, the crew members may be placed in a prone position or may be seated in an upright position while operating the aircraft.  Additional sensors may be placed on the legs and feet of the pilots and weapons officers for more channels of control input.

In a typical mission profile the pilot would don a pressure suit fitted with Wii sensors that report the position and acceleration of the limbs. The pilot would buckle into a specially designed ejection seat that would allow for the desired freedom of motion.  The pilot would extend his arms horizontally to either side and issue engine commands by producing gutteral sounds on the throat sensors.

The system has only seen use in simulators at this time, but Professor Fine anticipates applications with remotely piloted vehicles and manned surveillance vehicles by 2016.  Fine suggested that a model for helicopter applications was in the works, but declined to comment further.  He did admit that uncommanded input caused by turbulence was a difficult problem, but progress has been made to control this issue.

Startup Failures

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Having been a part of several startups that failed, I think I can speak credibly about aspects of the startup phenomenon.  My friend Bill who lives in a state shaped like an oven mit sent a link to a blog written by a venture capitalist (VC). The long and short of it is that, according to this VC, too many discoveries reported in the biotech literature are based on very slender threads of experimental evidence and often have been performed by a limited number of people.  He ges on to lament that the nature of grant funding may contribute to an R&D style that focuses on reporting only the best looking data that supports the hypothesis forming the basis of the grant.  The basis of his commentary is his experience funding biotechstartups.

Based on my life experiences I have no doubt that his comments are reasonable.

The unspoken rule is that at least 50% of the studies published even in top tier academic journals – Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, etc… – can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. In particular, key animal models often don’t reproduce.  This 50% failure rate isn’t a data free assertion: it’s backed up by dozens of experienced R&D professionals who’ve participated in the (re)testing of academic findings. This is a huge problem for translational research and one that won’t go away until we address it head on.     –Bruce Booth, Life Sci VC.

The thing is, this phenomenon doesn’t have to be based on dishonesty, though sometimes it is.  It is in the nature of entrepreneurs to be extremely (or rabidly) optimistic about the value of their ideas.  Entrepeneurs who are specialists with some kind of standing in their field, ie., minimally having tenure or a tenure track slot at a reputable institution, can produce very convincing PowerPoint presentations and handwaving arguments to support their assertions. Especially in front of viewers and investors who are desperate to find the “next big thing”.  Finding investors is a numbers game. You simply have to go out in the big, big world and talk to a great many people. Eventually you will find people who want to invest in a startup.  It is a form of enchantment. And charismatic entrepreneurs learn early on that they can do this.

If you thought that this is limited to biotech or to academic entrepreneurs, you’d be wrong.  I’ve seen this kind of thing up close in other areas of technology. I can say that the prospect of riches just over the horizon can move otherwise sober individuals to commit significant resources to the startup wagon train. 

Especially dangerous is the entrepreneur with a patent or even a portfolio of them.  Having a patent amounts to an endorsement by the US government, or so it would appear to the unwary.  I’ve witnessed entrepreneurs collect and spend millions of dollars of investors money on nothing more than a patent based on handwaving. Remember, patent examiners do not require that you trot out a working model and run it for a while.  Before you invest, I would recommend that you demand to be shown a working model or some other hard evidence of proof of concept.

There are several ways to set up shop in the world economy. One is to steal market share. This is the better mousetrap world of “market pull”.  You develop a product or service that is superior in some way and compels customers to abandon their loyalties. You depend on taking someone else’s share of the pie.

The other way to set up shop is a bit harder. And riskier.  It is the “technology push” domain and consists of introducing new capability through goods and services.  It is more than taking a share of the pie- it is baking a new kind of pie.  This is the realm of the paradigm shift. Examples are the introduction of petroleum, electricity, vacuum tube electronics, synthetic chemistry, semiconductors, and the internet to name some of the really big ones. 

But not all technology push history is so grand. Most technology push is incremental.  Marketing products that create new capability requires early  investors and early adopters. And not everyone wants to be an early to the show.  The trick for purveyors of technology push is to get the cash flow going by selling to early adopters.

I would offer this to those who want to be involved in a startup.  Demand results from a marketing study and examine them as closely as you might the technology. If the entrepreneurs are hazy on how the sales part will look, then watch out.  If they have not included money people and marketing people early in their adventure, then the investor or employee should beware. It’s not all about the technology in the startup.  The entrepreneurs should be as focused on sales and marketing as the tech package. This is where academic entrepreneurs can be extremely weak.

Black Swan

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Just watched the movie Black Swan directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman as the lead character.  It’s quite well done but it’s rated R for a reason. Mildly intense in places. Mormons and Baptists will want to select “Benji Does Dollywood” or some other wholesome meditation instead.

I have to say that Portman played the transformation of the White Swan into the Black Swan both on and off stage in a most compelling way. The actual Black Swan scene near the end is brief but spellbinding.

Lamentations on Professional Sports

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I’ll admit that I’m not a sports fan. Football, baseball, basketball- it’s all just millionaires in tight pants or baggy shorts. Pre-game shows, post-game shows, hyperventilated blather, color commentary, merchandising, endlessly excessive analysis of minutae. It’s all a bit too much. It is a repetitious pageant of faux gladiators wrapped up in a glitzy Las Vegas style package promising wildly more than it delivers.

March is basketball fever time. My God! How the hell can you people sit through this stuff? Here is a proposed improvement to the game. Raise the hoop 24 inches.  If you can dunk the ball, the hoop is too low. This seems obvious. 

Is there a correlation between the popularity of Bud Light and the popularity of basketball?  Two dreadfully bland inventions beloved by a common population?  Hmmm.  Panem et circenses.

Yeah, yeah. I know. How can a guy who “writes” a blog like this criticize basketball for being boring?  I don’t know. I’ll have come up with a rebuttal.