Ion Legend

What first attracted you to science?

My dad was an engineer, so I was always interested in technology. But what really inspired me was a seventh grade science teacher. I did receive a chemistry set for Christmas one year (back in the day when you were allowed useful chemicals), but it was the short introduction at school that made me realize I wanted to be a chemist. I actually remember a specific triggering experiment; our teacher was explaining acids and bases with sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid, and did the classic titration with a pH indicator (phenolphthalein). She told us that at the end of the titration it was basically salt and asked for a volunteer to taste it. I was the volunteer... The fact that you could take two really poisonous chemicals and mix them together to form something as innocuous as salt really piqued my interest. Science almost seemed like magic. My father helped me build a small laboratory in the basement (complete with its own natural gas supply) and I had an electrolysis set up – but my main interest was explosives. I found that gunpowder is not that explosive – but I had a lot of fun with silver acetylide...

You’re clearly an inventive and experimental chemist – does that explain your drive to publish patents?

I guess so! My original goal was to publish 50 patents by the time I retired. I’m now at 77 and don’t feel like retiring yet; I’ve upped it to 100... for now. I remember the very first patent was based on work that I did at Clorox. As an analytical chemist, one of my roles was competitive product analysis – it was like being a detective. Many of the washing powders back then used sodium sulfate as diluent, and I had to use barium sulfate precipitation in a convoluted and, to my dismay, not very accurate analytical method. I became interested in analyzing inorganic ions with chromatography, and Hamish Small had published a paper on ion chromatography in Analytical Chemistry. When I showed the paper to my boss, trying to convince him to invest, he told me I should make one. We bought the components and, sure enough, we made a functioning ion chromatograph. But one critical aspect was a column that could function at high pH. I only had access to silica-based materials, which wouldn’t last too long. One evening, when I was driving home from work an idea popped into my head (based on my experience with ion-pair chromatography): if I used a suppressor, I could use C18 silica rather than ion exchange material. I realized that probably wasn’t even covered by the ion chromatography patent.

Clorox decided it was “unpatentable,” but I ended up meeting with both the CEO and the head of R&D at Dionex, who later bought the rights to my invention (from Clorox) for the price of a single instrument. A few months later, they offered me a job. Dionex filed the patent, which was granted with ‘no office actions’. The whole process fascinated me, and I wondered if I could do it again – or was I a ‘one hit wonder’?

What about the fish that got away?

When you get a rejection letter from the patent office, in a weird way they are testing your determination – you have to be persistent. We gave up too early on one important potential patent, which was based on my invention of high pH anion exchange chromatography for the separation of carbohydrates. There was some prior art and the patent office argued that it was “obvious.” But the previous work was done in the 1950s, and other papers noted that reducing sugars could not be separated at high pH because they would degrade – so it was clearly not so obvious. Nevertheless, we didn’t know enough to push at the time. Funnily enough, we wrote “patent pending” in that paper (my second highest cited), and no one was brave enough to challenge it for nearly 10 years...

Which patent are you most proud of?

The first patent is always special but, to be honest, it wasn’t all that successful. Two patents top my list. The first is a technique for accelerated (or pressurized) solvent extraction. I think it’s the only patent where I did nothing other than come up with the idea. Nevertheless, it essentially kick-started an analytical industry by itself. The second is more recent and was based on hyperbranched chemistry that I originally dreamt up in 2003; it has proven to be very versatile in the manufacture of anion exchange columns. It’s kind of like the chemistry equivalent of LEGO, and rather uniquely uses a HPLC pump to alternatively react a linear polymer with two reagents (diepoxide and a primary amine) to coat a resin in a column. In addition to being commercially successful, it’s also a completely new synthesis method for anion exchange materials and a pure chemistry patent, which makes it special for me.

What skills make you a successful inventor?

Well, I spend a lot of my time thinking through problems while being open to non-obvious answers. I remember for the hyperbranched chemistry, I was actually seeking a solution to another practical challenge when I led myself down my own series of branches. Often, necessity really is the mother of invention.

The accelerated solvent extraction invention also came from an interesting source. My boss was harassing me to use supercritical CO₂ (seemingly a panacea in those days) to clean some problematic polystyrene resins. The experiment didn’t work at all. Six months later, I saw a guy give a paper on using SFC (with supercritical methylene chloride) on polystyrene, which got me thinking. I figured I could just use hot methylene chloride in an extraction cell. Another year later, another boss was working on SFE, and noted that if supercritical CO₂ wasn’t up to the extraction task, it could be spiked with a little methanol – but then it wasn’t supercritical anymore. I agreed and told him he didn’t even need the CO₂ or supercritical conditions (admittedly, I had not actually done that experiment). He asked the SFE group to work on it that Friday – and they thought it was such a bad idea that they spent their weekend trying to prove me wrong. By Monday, they were convinced it worked.

Your ideas often seem to stem from thought experiments...

In a way. A lot of my ideas come from keeping my eyes open to what’s really happening in the chemistry, and not taking as gospel what people think about a particular system. People can sometimes make the mistake of turning speculation into fact... But it’s also about testing the limits and curiosity. The work on my first patent stemmed from wanting to see how far I could push ion pairs – at what point are they no longer ion pairs? It also made me wonder whether there was some other interaction going on – something that was postulated much later on, but which is insinuated in the patent.

Sometimes it’s simply about patience. Hamish Small talks of a “mental attic” where he stores ideas until the day he figures out a way to use them. I guess I’m similar in that way.

But science is competitive – is there enough time to be patient?

My pet peeve is when people rush towards a goal, changing multiple parameters at once in a system they think they understand. They achieve the goal, and pick one of the parameters as the reason for success. Later on, they discover it was the other parameters or all in combination. Personally, I like to keep a mental log book of every time an experiment contradicts my theory. If they start to add up, I start to ask, why?

When I get the chance to talk to undergraduates, I always like to point out that the published literature is not always correct. And I can offer examples of utter nonsense. I should not name names... But there was one case where I knew both authors – and the deeply flawed work – and warned the editor of one high-impact journal to reject the paper. Instead, they made me a reviewer. I rejected it – but the paper was published in another high-level journal...

Have you ever considered starting your own company?

There are a couple of reasons why I’ve never turned ‘lone wolf’, but the main truth is, I like doing the research more than I like the business aspects. The thrill of discovering completely new analytical techniques and platforms is so much fun that I can’t imagine doing anything else – and that’s what’s kept me where I am for so long.

What advice can you offer others eager for success?

As a researcher, it’s critical that you make sure you really control your experiments (and variables) so that you can (attempt to) produce unambiguous results. Furthermore, it’s no good quitting just because you’re pleased with one particular set of results. For some reason, it can be tempting to cease using the scientific method when you’re an expert. But actually, you need it just as much as the novice.

I think my own successes are strongly linked to the fact that I’m doing something that I really enjoy. I still remember being in the lab at Dionex in the very early days and thinking to myself, “I cannot believe I get paid to do this. I would do this for free!”