Category Archives: CounterCurrent

Ways to be a chemical entrepreneur

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I had a discussion with some professor friends recently about the subject of entrepreneurialism among chemists.  I made my usual points about how people become captains of industry. Be more like an engineer. Preferably one with an MBA.  Naturally, my professorly friends were unmoved. Having spent their entire careers in academia, they just didn’t know about this. I didn’t expect them to.

After I made a gross generalization about the lack of entrepreneurialism among chemists, one prof pointed out that in her field of research, there were indeed people who were starting ventures.  I do not doubt this. But it made me think.  People, perhaps especially those in higher education or just advanced technology, naturally conclude that an entrepreneurial venture has to be based on new technology.  Yes, we need people to start businesses in nanotechnology or what ever you call the latest iteration of biochemistry. We need to have a constant churn of people trying to put new products and capabilities on the table.

But we also need businesses who are able to make polysubstituted phenols, anilines, pyridines, alcohols, ketones, aldehydes, halides, and all of the other “ordinary” raw materials and intermediates that are now largely made in Asia. We need companies who will make 100 kg or 1 MT of some obscure organic material.  Entrepreneurialism isn’t just about the bleeding edge. It is about having a dream and seizing opportunity.  It can be cookies or chemicals.

For the most part, intermediates have moved to Asia because of the economics of batch processing fine chemicals. And a moribund approach to chemical manufacturing in the USA. Chemical manufacturing in the USA is complicated. There are environmental permits, TSCA, high waste disposal costs, high labor costs, expensive processing equipment, and layers of business structure to manufacture safely and with high quality. A chemist faced with navigating the maze of regulations, engineering details, and business operations is a busy person indeed.  Few people can do all of it alone.

There are two fundamental approaches to starting a technology company- Market pull and technology push.  Market pull is an activity where one builds manufacturing capacity with the intent of filling it by making exsting items of commerce. Technology push is where one intends to construct a new kind of technology in the form of a service or widget. Market pull is an approach wherein customers buy known technology. Technology push is the activity where the customer is asked to buy into a new product or service. In this case, you’re necessarily asking customers to be first adopters or to find new forms of value.

I’ve seen startups fail because their one-act pony didn’t work. Instead of trying to make a go of it with a one-act pony, a whole circus of acts should be going at once.  A batch reactor is capable of making many things. A plant built around one product is entirely dependent on that one product.  Batch reactors occupied with products from many market segments are batch reactors that will remain busy over a variety of market conditions.

Pharmaceutical intermediate manufacturing is a business weighed down with substantial overhead and structural immobility.  It is not automatically a great place to start. The GMP world is very complex and peppered with many operational land mines. Many early intermediates are not covered under GMP. That is a good place to start. 

ISO certification is another area where I take issue. While ISO certification brings good business practices, it also brings layers of administrative structure. It is possible to mimic this structure without formally adopting it. The ISO label on you advertising will impress some buyers, but a surprising niumber will be indifferent. If you want to be in pharma intermediates, this will be necessary.  What an ISO certification says is that you will do what you say you are going to do. That is a good idea regardless.

What has to change is the economics of manufacturing in the USA. One way to do this is automated synthesis.  A good example of a problem:  How would one automate the synthesis of an OLED chemical like 1 MT of 8-hydroxyquinoline? This is an existing item of commerce, so entry into the market means taking share from someone else. You’ll probably have to best the market price by 10 % at minimum to induce someone to switch vendors. 

The chemistry isn’t cutting edge, but the processing economics may be. This is an example of how entrepreneurialism can and should  tackle manufacturing problems and gain a competitive edge. Since labor cost is a huge driver, find a way to shave off labor. An entrepreneur’s competitive edge may be process cost savings alone. You don’t have to wait for a scientific paradigm shift.

Part of success is just showing up. Just having capacity and a knack for a particular transformation can attract buyers. If you are handy with borylation and are flexible, somebody will call and want a quote. And maybe a sample. Pretty soon you have a PO and a deadline.

It is good to consider that an advance may be in the form of processing economics, not just the science.

Salmagundi

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The world wide web is a never ending source of wonderment … for the curious.  It’s just email for everyone else.

A 3-D priniting device has been demonstrated using concentrated sunlight to fuse sand into sintered glass structures. In the Sahara. Where there is a lot of sand and sunlight, naturally.

Think you understand why the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991?  Think it was the dynamic duo of Ronnie Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, and their SDI that done em’ in? Well, these two characters had a part in it certainly. But the USSR was at the peak of its power by that time.  And they knew that SDI was decades from implementation. What was the real reason that the powerful and influential USSR collapsed? The article in the July/August issue of Foreign Policy by Aron Leon gives some interesting insights into that period of history,

Malcom Gladwell on spaghetti sauce.

Whither tellurium?

Retro NMR

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We received our picoSpin 45 MHz NMR last week. It’s the size of a toaster and sits on the benchtop next to the computer. We brought in a bunch of chemists to see a demonstration. Most of them were fresh PhD’s on their first job out of grad school. I think they were non-plussed. What on God’s green earth would someone accustomed to using 300-500 MHz NMR want with a low field FT instrument like this?

Let me say that I am a fan of this thing and the company. Yes, it is retro in some ways. It lacks the sensitivity and features many of us are used to. However, it is an FT instrument and can be used to examine a great many substances. In a high field instrument, it seems like everything  is a doublet of doublets. Not in this instrument. For routine analysis of reaction completion, for instance, you may already know the spectrum of your product or starting materials. One or two reasonably isolated diagnostic peaks is all you need to gauge the state of your reaction. You almost never need coupling constants and fancy 2-D spectra at this point. Often, high resolution amounts to excess capacity. And you can have picoSpin in the lab with you. No need to trudge to the NMR room for a routine spectrum. Oh yes, it’s $20,000 for the unit.

We have a high field instrument, but not at my location. Between the GCMS and the picoSpin, I have a good bit of analytical capability.  What I like about this is that the picoSpin offers a lot of analysis per dollar. Of course a high field instrument offers superior capability. But the fact is that most instrumentation on the market today provides considerable excess capacity. For instance, how much of the capability of Microsoft Excel or Word do you actually use? Perhaps 10 %?  I’d offer that a large fraction of the total dollar amount spent on scientific instrumentation worldwide amounts to excess capacity.  People are easily dazzled by the possibilites in a list of features. Sales people know this and actually depend on it.

So, I’m exploring how this miniature marvel can be integrated into daily use in a chemical manufacturing plant. Chemists are a stubborn lot and it may be that I can’t crack this nut. We’ll see.

Snow

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Wow. The mountains of the Colorado Front Range got a fresh coat of snow last night. Looks like it extends below timberline.   The winter wheat harvest will happen in a few weeks.  By mid-July we will be into the monsoon season here.  That is when pacific moisture brings a bit of rain and moderates temperatures for a few weeks. By August it’s hot and dry like everywhere else.

I had the occasion to go to a barbeque at the farm of a local Coors barley farmer saturday evening.  He has been featured in numerous Coors ads on TV, in part because his family has been growing Coors barley for 52 years, but also because he provides a very striking persona for television.  From the collectors items on display, he is very much an admirer of John Wayne and John Deere.

Challenging the paradigm

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Increasingly I am a fan of LinkTV. It is one of the very few alternative content networks around. I try to catch Deutche Wella  and Al Jazeera on Link a few times per week for a different perspective of world events. 

News programming in the US evolved decades ago into a business model which delivers manufactured consent to those who’ll pay for it.   News programmers in the US for the most part seem to have a notion that only they know what we really want to see. So they roll their tape for us.  Who really decides where the beady eye of scrutiny is pointed?

Really now. Why do we have the same tedious group of talking heads making the rounds on the news programs? In a country of 300 million, we can’t find a few others who will say something new or at least unexpected?  It’s just like the stars who appear on Leno.  In exchange for a free “performance”on the show, they get to promote their latest gig. It’s about low cost content.

In the case of news, the network gets “compelling commentary” for free by a guest who is calculated to cause eyeballs to linger a few moments.  News content has the shelflife of squid. It is no good tomorrow.

If you’re not alarmed by this kind of thing then you’re not paying attention.  Knock knock!! I’m talking to the 2/3 of the bell curve who may suspect that Fox, for instance, occasionally makes things up to suit the needs of its backers.  The 1/3 who watch Fox assiduously are perhaps not recoverable from their trance.

Numerous coworkers claim to be independent thinkers, but to a man or woman, will spout the same vocabulary and pre-framed concepts. They get their talking points from Fox, as directed.  I love these people, but their view of the world is a cartoon drawn by a couple of guys in a sound booth. It is sad.

A Modest Proposal for the Eurozone

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Here is what I propose as a solution for the European debt crisis.  Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland should be given the option of swapping land in exchange for their debt. What land? Take a line of latitude from the southernmost tip northward until an area of land redeemed is equal to (debt (Euro) / 5000 Euro/hectare) which covers the debt. 

It should be pointed out that Napoleon voluntarily swapped the Louisiana territory for cash to raise operating funds for his adventures. After all, he was coming into new property in Europe.

As my consulting fee, I’ll take the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland. It’s a charming spit of land and will be more than suitable.

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.

Misc Sciency Stuff

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Think it’s possible to build an electron microscope in your garage?  This guy did it. Ben Krasnow built himself a scanning electron microscope at home with salvaged electronic parts.  This is beyond cool.

Final flight of Endeavor. Cool shot of rocket in the clouds. Could be photoshopped with all of the color saturation, but maybe not.

Neuroscientists in the UK think that the brains of Apple enthusiasts are stimulated by Apple imagery in the same way that religious adherents are stimulated by religious imagery.

It has been suggested that flood plains exist because of flooding.  Something to consider on your next home purchase.

Nasa is floating the idea that there may be more free floating, lone planets than stars.  Sounds very cold.

The destruction of the world commences this weekend.  I guess we’d better get packed.

Texas Justice. Fishing Crimes.

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You know, I really do like Texans. I lived there for a few years and I think I have an accurate sense of the place.  But Texans are Texans. It really is “like a whole ‘nother country” sometimes.

The Texas legislature recently passed the Fish Fraud law which specifically addresses the problem of fraud at fishing tournaments. The bill passed the house 142 to 4 and the senate 30 to 1 and awaits signing by the governor.  The bill provides penalties for fraud starting at a Class A Misdemeanor for the first offense to a third degree Felony for fishing crimes involving greater than $10,000 in prize money.  

According to the article, game wardens and prosecutors approached Representative Dan Flynn about  a fish fraud incident at Lake Ray Hubbard east of Dallas in October of 2009. Rep Flynn jumped on this outrage and brought the beady eye of scrutiny to bear on those dark hearted anglers who dare to flim-flam fishing tournaments. Case in point:  A semi-pro angler forced a 1 pound weight into a 9.5 lb bass, misrepresenting the weight of the fish and thus defrauding the tournament organizers. 

Without the benefit of a Fish Fraud law, the crooked angler got 15 days in jail, 5 years of probation, and loss of his fishing license for the duration of his probation.

It certainly seems to me like Texas Justice was swift and unblinking in this case without a special law on the books. The miscreant who perpetrated this act was nabbed by the local constable and thrown behind bars.

Ever wonder why there are so many laws on the books? This is an example of how it happens. Somebody games the system and legislators rush in to pack legislative caulking into a perceived hole in the wall. The Texas legislature has felonized yet somethng else. 

Are we really better off with an ever expanding definition of felonious acts?  The fisherman’s wickedness is plain for all to see. But does this one case merit the enactment of yet one more piece of legislation?  If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Maybe it’s best if we take some time off from inventing new laws and look at what we’ve wrought?