Category Archives: Chemistry

US Chemical Business Innovation. Policy or Culture?

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The May 23rd, 2011, issue of C&EN, pp 30-31, printed an article titled “Innovation Policy Urged for U.S.”.  The article addresses more than a few considerations regarding the matter of innovation aspirations in the US. You can read the article for yourself. It details some silliness about government programs meant to stimulate startup’s. 

Startups are always in need of money. Like the salmon’s struggle to swim past the grizzlies to the upstream breeding waters, the struggle for resources is part of the Darwinistic screening process.  The struggle for operating funds is a way of screening out weak management. The trouble is, entrepreneurs are often awful managers so good products and services may die for the wrong reason.  Investor money is always loaded with conditions, as any startup operator knows.

The article quotes Richard Bendis, president and CEO of the consulting firm Innovation America. To quote Bendis, “Major research universities are the primary drivers of the future economy and job growth, mostly through science and technology. Global economic competitiveness requires the confluence of scientific discovery and the enabling resources of government and industry.” 

Well, Ok. It’s hard to take him to task here. But the last sentence is gobbledygook. What government cannot provide is the motivation or gumption on the part of chemists to start a company. Chemists need to be exposed to entrepreneuralism well before the day they set out to hatch a startup.  The current course of study in the bachelors program at virtually any US college or university is proctored by faculty who almost without exception come from a purely academic background. They know nothing about “industry” other than the salaries are probably better.

As Bendis rightly states, “Major research universities are the primary drivers of the future economy and job growth, mostly through science and technology.”  But major research universities, with a few exceptions, are poorly equipped to find and train chemists to be the future captains of of industry. It is a culture problem. The structure of the university chemistry department is not constructed to groom anything but scholarship. The American Chemical Society certification is part of the problem. The ACS recognizes and endorses a particular kind of curriculum. Most all chemistry departments have secured this endorsement long ago.  While the curriculum defines the minimum standards for a degree in chemistry, it also has the effect of freezing out much real innovation or adaptability in the field.

Faculty with business or industrial backgrounds are largely deselected from joining the club, if for no other reason than publication rates. Industrial chemists rarely have the opportunity to publish their work in the normal spread of journals owing to IP restrictions.  I’ve been a part of  a few search committees and I know how it can go.

The main exception to my generalization is MIT. Whatever it is that MIT is doing to stimulate startups, it’s does it very well. They are practically a force of nature by themselves. I would argue that the Mojo that MIT plainly possesses has more to do with culture than policy.

And it’s not just chemistry faculty that have to adapt to a new endgame in the program. The matter of turning a program to applied science must necessarily involve deans and university presidents.  They will all want to have their say. In the end, to most presidents, getting in the top 25 of whatever group of schools they aspire to be in is what matters. And that involves keeping the enrollment numbers and the endowment figures up. That is how they are measured and that is what they will look after.

Putting out applied science oriented majors will involve considerable cultural change in the academy. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that the academy is ready to embrace a real step towards the kind of entrepreneurial spirit in the aspirations expressed in the article in C&EN.  It is very difficult to be heard over the clucking in the academic henhouse.

Memorial Day and Inventors Conscience

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Here is an interesting post called When Chemists go to War.  It is a good reminder of how our work can be taken to places where we ourselves wouldn’t go.  Ever develop chemistry that has killed someone? What would you do if you developed a substance that was used for destructive purposes? Would it bother you?  Some scientists from the Manhattan Project were troubled by their work on the bomb, but others slept quite well.

I suppose it could be considered similar to the situation with the inventor of the baseball bat. Could this inventor have forseen the use of the bat in committing violence? Probably didn’t cross his mind.  But if you’re inventing new military explosives, how do you cope with the knowledge that your invention’s use is specifically for more precise application of killing power?  The fact is that there are many scientists who have no difficulty with this at all. I’ve met a few of them and they are very sober folks. They know exactly what their invention does and they are eager to do even better.

I think it is this ability to stand behind the abstract technical details, sheltered from the blood and guts reality, that allows scientists to rationalize their work on killing technology. Scientists will never have to carry with them the olfactory battlefield  memories of bomb smoke and shredded bowel.  Weapons labs are relatively safe places to work.  The weapons scientists biggest hazard, realistically, is the commute to and from the lab. Perhaps weapons designers and munitions manufacturers should have to clean up after a car bomb or carry bodies from the scene so as to emphasize the exact consequences of this work.

Maybe the most important thing we can do to honor soldiers lost and wounded in battle is to resolve that we will produce fewer dead and wounded soldiers. One approach embraced by many is to make war more effiicient and more automated. Send machines into battle rather than people. The other approach is to be a bit less warlike. Throttle back on weapons spending. Take the view that war isn’t really glorious, but rather that it is an uncivilized duty we are called upon to do on occasion. 

Amassing huge armed forces presents the temptation to use them.  The goal for our national leaders should be … lead us not into temptation.

Cyanide-Based Legislative Voting Machine

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The US patent literature is full of wondrous inventions and its easy access by computer-machine over the internets is a real boon to historians and hacks like myself.  In the course of my studies into 19th century gold metallurgy, I stumbled across US 7,521, issued July 22, 1850. This patent was issued to Albert N. Henderson of Buffalo, NY.  Mr. Henderson’s invention is entitled IMPROVEMENT IN THE APPLICATION OF ELECTRO-CHEMICAL PRINTING IN COLORS FOR TAKING AYES AND NOES. 

Henderson describes an apparatus for taking the ayes and noes by galvanic electricity and specifically proposed it for use in legislative assemblies. The concept was that at each desk in the assembly would be two keys (switches, as we now call them) for voting either Aye of No. The member would press one of the keys when called to vote, with the result of an electric current passing to a central apparatus with specially treated paper pressed between electrodes. The action of the current in the damp treated paper would be that a vote would be registered as a mark on the paper, recording the vote of the member.  In the end, the only gold connection in the patent related to gold electrodes as a preferred embodiment.

Claim 1.  This patent claims a mode of imprinting words, letters, & figures, etc, upon paper or other fibrous substances between two surfaces of a metal which is not acted upon by the substances employed, on one of which the letters or figures are raised by passing a current of galvanic electricity through the prepared material, substantially as above described.

Claim 2. Passing the electric current between metallic surfaces, as above described, through damp paper otherwise unprepared, and afterward applying a chemical solution, by which the effect of the electricity becomes visible whenever it has passed through the paper, for the purposes above described- telegraphing, etc.

Substances which may be used as part of the solution for the preparation of the paper- Copper sulfate (gives black impression), Potassium cyanide which may be acidified with H2SO4 or HNO3 (!!) to impart a green color with the galvanic current.  A strong solution of KCN with Ag chloride gives a green impression. All above leave white paper until acted upon by electricity.  A weak soln of potassium ferrocyanide (prussiate of potassia) colors the paper slightly and leaves a deep blue impression by the electricity. Henderson prefers to use electrodes of gold or platinum.

This invention has a kind of steampunk aspect that I find very appealing. On the other hand, it is hard to know what knowledge the inventor had with regard to the hazards of KCN or acidified solutions thereof. The patent is silent with regard to the chemical safety questions arising from the use of KCN treated paper.

Albemarle enters lithium market

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Here is one I didn’t see coming.  Albemarle has announced that it will be entering the lithium carbonate market.  In case you didn’t know, Albemarle has been a leader in bromine and brominated flame retardants for some time.  Economically speaking, if you want to be a bromine specialist or brominator at the commodity scale you should probably be basic in bromine. That is, you get your bromine feedstocks from underground or the Dead Sea.

Everybody likes the benefits of flame retardants but nobody likes to pay much for it, so manufacturing has to be large scale to keep the retardant prices down. The way you do that is to pull bromide from the ground, often as a brine, and oxidize the bromide to bromine and isolate it from your process stream. Albemarle has recent US patent applications for the nth iteration of their technology: see US 2010/0047155 A1.

A quick perusal of Albemarle patents failed to turn up any US patents or published applications indicating that they had been working on this. This press release must have been given special consideration in view of anticipated demand for their lithium. 

Since Albemarle is already tooled up for brine work it is not such a stretch to see that they are piloting lithium extraction from their process streams. According to Specialty Chemicals, a chemical trade publication, the Albemarle brines contain 100-300 ppm of Li and sources say that they are using an exchange resin for the isolation. While the brines at it’s Magnolia, Arkansas, facility are a little on the lean side in lithium, the fact is that they are already set up for brine processing. A large chunk of capital costs for recovery have already been put in place for the bromine operation. So, it’s a matter of setting up a Li extraction train to intercept the brine stream somewhere in the Br process.

Setting up ancillary process trains like this to recover other values is not at all uncommon. According to the Specialty Chemicals article, Albemarle expects to be producing lithium carbonate in 2013.

The USGS publishes annual reviews on the global stockpile situation with economically important minerals, lithium included.  A prominent source of lithium in the US is the Tin-Spodumene belt at King’s Mountain District, NC. Spodumene, LiAlSi2O6, is the principal mineral variety at Kings Mountain.  Chemetall Foote, a subsidiary of Rockwood Holdings, now operates at Kings Mountain, NC, in Nevada, and  Salar de Atacama in Chile.

According to Virginia Heffernan at the website Mining Markets, the cost of spodumene processing to afford lithium carbonate is quite high, $5500 per tonne of Li2CO3. Acid roasting is used to process the ore to liberate the lithium.

According to the article at Mining Markets the three major players in global lithium are Chile’s Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (30 %), Chemetall (28 %), and FMC (19%).

Reading, searching, researching, and writing. My life as a chemist.

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It turns out that I like Russian fiction. On a lark I picked up a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol on Amazon (ISBN 978-0-14-044907-5). It was worthwhile. 

Actually, it wasn’t such a lark. I was looking for a copy of Diary of a Madman.  The idea was to find a cutting for an audition, in case such an opportunity arose.  Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and The Government Inspector have been performed for generations and, as usual, I’m the last of my age cohort to read it.

I spend my days supervising chemical research, doing reactive hazard studies and IP analysis. From the job description point of view, I’m a walking, jabbering freak. How the hell am I going to get a job elsewhere with a resume like that? HR will look at it and, failing to find an exact match in their organization, toss it into the discard folder.  I don’t fear chemicals, but I do fear HR.  HR is the bane of our profession.

Back to the day job, these areas are basically writing activities and occur at a desk. It has occured to me that working at a desk is more dangerous than working with chemicals.  You soon get fat(ter) and stressed. It’s not good. 

It is funny how job descriptions differ. Many colleagues have jobs where they execute some task by bringing something into a predetermined structure. By that I mean, an analyst performs a standard procedure or the QA manager documents data for a product cert. An accountant performs procedures in the general ledger according to rules. Their work is reasonably well defined and they know when they are done.

Not a single thing I do is amenable to this kind of structured performance.  The chemistry stuff is experimental and involves sorting out what the hell happened. That’s just the nature of applied scientific investigation.

The IP work involves searching for information. If you find a relevant patent, well, you might be near the endpoint. Lucky day. But if you don’t find claims on a composition or a process, it’s a negative result. You have to ask if your search strategy was adequate. Anyone who has used a search engine knows what I mean. Sometimes, you don’t pick the best search terms and you come up with junk. Eventually you blunder into the right term and find the mother lode.

Sometimes an information search becomes dendritic. You find yourself bobbing along in the brackish waters of the “merely interesting”. So, you back up and revise the search terms.  Doing an IP search for an exact composition in CAS is very straightforward. A structure search or a CASRN search is very reliable and fast.

Much time can be wasted with patents that use compositions or processes but do not claim them. In particular I mean patents that mention compounds in the description (or specification) but do not claim them in the claim section.  A great many patents may be served up in the list of hits in this way. How you deal with this depends on what you want and what kind of search tool you’re using.

If you are interested in a class of compositions or the range of technology that might be out there, this is a kind of search that is more dendritic and subject to stranding in cul de sacs. If you do not use Chemical Abstracts Service in some way, your options become restricted.  There are many IP services that tap the various patent offices around the world. Some seem to have their own databases. Many seem to focus solely on searching the patent data through clever use of search terms or the patent classification system. For prior art searching, this is inadequate. For the most part, only CAS can provide reliable hits if a compound was reported in Acta Retracta by Professor van Wingenheuk in 1907.

After a day of reading abstracts and patents, it’s nice to read something well written and get lost in it for a little while. Patents are not written to be easily understood. They are often masterful in their obfuscation. I often admire the conciseness with which many are written. But in the end, they are all disclosures written grudgingly and with the intent to obscure.

Memo to Aldrich, or ahem, SAFC

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[Note: The rest of you can go about your business. This memo is to whomever at SAFC will listen. If you’re not SAFC, click here or here.]

Dear Aldrich, or shall I say SAFC?

I have a bone to pick wth you. I’ve noticed that the bottles of reagents I have received from you in the last year have been labeled with a newly formatted design. The Aldrich bottles do indeed stand out on the shelf in resplendent red and white as designed. Well done. The bottles function in the manner in which they are intended. Again, well done. All of that is as expected.

What I’m unhappy with is the fact that the labels all seem to lack the molecular weight of the contents. Having grown accustomed to finding the MW on the bottle, I now have to set the bottle down in the lab and reach for the calculator to do it myself.  After decades of using Aldrich products with the MW printed on the bottle, my addled brain now has to unlearn this and do the calculation myself.

So, what caused this? It was not an accident, was it? Were there complaints about printing errors that twittered your legal people?  Were there a series of meetings in which serious senior managers furrowed their brows and intervened over the possibility of liability? Nothing like the mention of liability to get a VP agitated.  Perhaps ink has gotten expensive.  I just don’t understand.

Was it one of us who complained? Was it some white-coated laboratory fussbudget? Did some crabby pisswink from “out there” write a letter and frighten someone in St Louis or Milwaukee? That would be sad.

One more thing. Why does the font size have to be so small on large labels? 

Th’ Gaussling

Helium

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With uptick of natural gas exploration and “recovery” happening, you have to wonder if anyone is bothering to look for helium in it? And I’m referring to the Marcellus shale formation in particular.  Wouldn’t it be nice for some forethought here and try to recover some of the helium that may be lost.  Helium is a non-renewable resource and is critical to many industrial sectors, including superconductor applications.

The US has held helium in reserve since 1925. Helium extraction has been most fruitful from gas wells in the western states. The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 has resulted in the release of the helium reserve to the private sector at a federally mandated price. The FY2011 price is$75.00 per thousand cubic feet.  

According to the BLM, the agency that manages the strategic reserve, their enrichment facility in Amarillo, TX, can produce 6 million cu ft per day of crude helium at ca 80 % purity. The Amarillo plant provides crude He to refiners who polish it to the necessary level of purity for the end user.

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.