W. H. Myers University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173 Many articles have been written and many conferencesheld whose suhiect has been the need to hridee the ean between the academic"and the industrial chemist. f h e academic chemist needs to know what the industrial chemist does so as to nrepare chemistry students for such work as well as to present accurately the role and work of the chemical industry to students in general. On the other hand, the industrial chemist needs to interact with the academic chemist to maintain a sense of chemistry a s a body of knowledgeconstantly growing and expanding in all dirwrions. Each stands to benefit areatlv . . from the fresh view the other takes of his work. The University of Richmond has a sabbatical program which allows its regular faculty periodically to take a leave of absence for the purpose of research or other professional growth. The leave period can he for half or all of an academic year, either of which is supported with half of one's regular salarv and benefits. I chose to try to arrange to spend my sabbatical in an industrial research lab, and I was fortunate enough to he able to make such arrangements with Ethyl Corporation Research and Develo~mentin Baton Rouee. Louisiana. I arraneed a period of nkar~yfifteen monthsbitween May of l98f and August 1982 in which to work. Ethyl Corporation agreed to provide the other half of my academic year salary and then, in effect, to hire me as a temporary employee for the summer periods. Five to six months before going to Baton Rouge, I was informed what project I was to be &signed, so that iwas able to do a considerable amount of lihrary work before actually heginning the sabbatical. Since the project was outside the specific fields in which I had worked previously, this chance to orient myself was quite valuable. For a project t o be attractive to industry it must be financially promising; that is, the project must offer some new way to make already commercialized products or must offer new products likely to be commercially attractive. Often, projects are proposed by laboratory chemists whose experiencecoupled with knowledee " of the literature allows them to see such possibilities. However, before such projects are undertaken,
a little preliminary lab work is done to determine feasibility, and economic evaluations are carried out to determine commercial potential. If these-studies are favorable, then the project may be staffed and carried out. However, since there are almost always more good ideas than personnel and resources to carry them out, some priorities must be established so that the most promising projects are carried out first. Such a process inevitably leads to agroup of projects being identified that are too speculative to staff immediately hut too promising to discard, and it was one of those that was assigned to me. Since anything I might have proposed would of necessity have had to have gone through all the same, time-consuming steps for evaluation, it was more efficient for them to assign me one from this group. In this way Ethyl got a year or so of work in an area of interest at the cost of my sabbatical support and the supplies and equipment required to conduct the research. I was given the impression that, by their standards, the investment was modest. When I arrived in Baton Rouge, I was treated as any other new professional employee would he. I participated in the orientation program, toured the plant facilities, met the various supervisory personnel, and joined the work routine. I was assigned work space and provided with chemicals, equipment, and access t o the laboratory's instrumentation, and I was introduced to the practices of weekly progress report writing and monthly project review meetings. I had already signed confidentiality and patent assignment agreements, the first of which controls disclosure of proprietary information and the second of which gave Ethyl the rights to patents and subsequent commercialization of any discoveries I might have made during any work there. The orientation program thus involved acquainting me with the way things were done a t Ethyl. After being given a thorough medical exam, supplied with safety glasses, and issued a lahoratory notebook with instructions on its use, I was introduced to the people through whom I could obtain pay, medical services, chemicals and other lab supplies, technical senices such as electrical work, plumbing, or carpentry, secretarial senices, and analytical services, each of whom gave me a quick lesson
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in how that service o~erated.Durine this same time I met the various supervisory personnel who would he overseeing me and mv work. For the most Dart this control was exercised through a monitoring of reports I provided. Each week I wrote for my immediate supervisor a brief summary of my accomplishments in the preceding week, and once a month I wrote and then discussed with several levels of su~ervisorsa summarv ~~l'acnmplishments, conclusions, and plans ior future work. This rrgular analysis ot work accomplished was quiw effwtive in kerping mr from becoming sidetracked from my o\.erall guals. ('opirs of my notehook recurds accompanied the monthly reports st, my suprrvisor could check my summary against the recurd itself. Since this record also would ser\,e as thr bi~sisfor nny patent npplica~ion,it was very important that it he complete and correct. This pnrt of my experience certainlv new meaning" to students' use of notehooks and .did give " reports in laboratory courses. One Dart of the orientation deserves snecial comment. The laboratbry safety officer schedules a conierence with each new e m ~ l o v e eto define and exolain in detail the various safetv reiuirkments and proced&es. Once this orientation was comnlete, . . I was then Dart of the work force and. as such, was suhject to routine safety inspections of my wdrk and work area, hoth announced and unannounced. Further. I attended and participated in regular safety meetings of both small and large groups at which safety rules and procedures are reinforced. One consequence of this was my determination to work harder than ever to instill a sense of "safety consciousness" into each of my students upon my return. The R&D labs in which I worked are part of a site at which Ethyl manufactures a variety of chemicals, the principal ones of which are tetraethyl lead and its precursors. Thus on this site Ethyl produces n,,t only tvtmt!thyl lead, but alsosodium, chlorine, ethylene dichloride, methyl vhluridr, \,ins1chloride, and I'VC resins.. and., in addiiion. facilities are available tllr the manufacture of a number of low volume specialty chemicals, including some of agricultural and medicinal value. A significant part of the orientation process for me was a detailed guided tour of all of the major manufacturing plants operating on site. Ethyl has an active seminar Droaram in which both inside and ontside speakers are involved: These experiences alone would have justified the sabbatical. Durinz the time I was there, the ar&wiral group presented a seri'es of orientation lectures un nrw analytical techniqurs, the Ieeal department gave a workshop on patent law a s i t applies to ind"stria1 researchers, and the mass spectroscopists gave a workshop on the interpretation of mass spectra, focusing on examples from research being done by the participants. This was in addition to a couple of dozen ontside speakers, several known nationally and internationally, speaking on topics ranging from the chemistry of natural products to organometallic chemistry and from the use of computers in the design of organic synthesis to novel methods of trace analysis. These speakers served to keep Ethyl's chemists abreast of the current state of such work as well as to establish communication channels in case consultation on specific Ethyl problems should be required in the future. My research project fell in the areas of organometalfics and catalysis, and in the course of the vear I was able to do a ereat variety of things in hoth areas. his has given me confiience in my ability hoth to teach about and to do research in organometallic chemistry now that I am back at Richmond. I have successfully applied on Ethyl's hehalf for a patent covering my discovery of a novel olefin metathesis catalyst? and Ethyl has agreed to allow me to publish some of that work.2 ~
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' Myers, W. H., U.S. Patent No. 4,423,275. Dec. 27, 1983.
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Myers, W. H.. paper #INOR30, 185th National ACS Meeting. Seattle, WA, March 21, 1983. 1082
Journal of Chemical Education
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I think I can summarize what I gained from the year in terms of six points. First, I had the experience of doing good work on good equipment without distractions or interruptions, from which I developed an expertise in a new area (to me) of chemistry. Our university department is equipped with a variety of routine instrumentation, including a Perkin Elmer R24 moton NMR. a Beckman IR-8. and a Varian EM-600 mass spectrumeter, most of whish is serviceahle hut d d . At Frhvl I tbund versatile, state-of-the-art eauioment. such as computer-controlled FT-IR, mnltinucleai FT-NMR, and GC-MS. all of which were maintained hv technical staff for immrdiatu w r and from which informatiin could br obtained raoidly and easily and since 1 was not tird down withwachina classes, gradinipapers, advising students, and attending committee meetings, I was free to concentrate my efforts on the research work I was doing. Second, I was able to see industrial chemistry and the lifestyle of the industrial chemist from the inside and over a long enough period that I began to feel a bit like an industrial chemist myself. As one whose joh includes preparing students for such positions, this experience was invaluable. I would say that the industrial chemists I met and worked with have as a group five major characteristics; they are professional, productive, versatile, safety-conscious, and multi-faceted. They are professional in that they worked in a spirit of shared effort. On occasion, things would happen such that overtime or weekend work was necessary to keep a project going. In such cases. the time was eiven with a minimum of fuss. and the iob was done. I t was not so much that they worked fdr Ethyl & it was that thev were Ethvl. in the sense that it was on their creativity and efforts that the company's continued economic health laraelv depended. Thev are ~roductiuein that thev arrived each morning a t 7:30 ready to work a full eight-hour day, during which they worked efficiently and conscientiously with a minimum of supervision.They automatically scheduled time for reading the literature, keeping notebooks up to date, writing reports, and housekeeping, while keeping their research going forward a t a good pace. They are uersatile in that they worked effectivelyon a variety of projects, often jumping between wildly different kinds of work in a manner of moments. I had always heard that industrial chemists were narrowly specialized, and perhaps it is so in some places, but a t Ethvl there was a lot of cross-trainine occurring amone the research staff. Whether this was delibeFate or coinkdentz was never clear, though I left suspecting it was hoth, hut certainly nearly any chemist there could be given nearly any project, with confidence of successful work.being done on it. They were safety-conscious in that they automatically worked safely and k e ~work t areas neat and clear of hazards. Thev checked on toxicity and disposal questions before ordering new chemicals, and they treated the periodic inspection and safety meeting as beneficial rather then burdensome. Finally they are multifaceted in that the erouD included some of the most interesting personalities ;hat i have ever met. Ethyl personnel were encouraged to develop a life ontside work, and most of the people did so. From farming to coaching soccer, from hunting and fishine to work in the arts. from church work to motorcycle racingrall kinds of outside interests were pnrsued. Third, I gained many new insights into teaching. For example, I returned with a new determination to instill in my students a sense of safety-consciousness that goes beyond simple adherence to a set of rules. They need not only to know how to be safe, they need to know what being safe means. In particular it is crucial to teach risk assessment and the allied concepts of acceptable and unacceptable risk. I also returned with a greater respect for the place of notebooks and reports in laboratory. I t is easy to forget how important it is to help students develop good habits, in particular in this connection to record all observations as they are made and to write reports that are factual, coherent, concise, and that use proper En-
glish. In the same spirit, I have a new attitude toward the deadlines I set for my students with regard to test times or due dates for papers, homework, or reports. I am beginning to see that I can do my student a great service by enforcing such deadlines fairly rigorously. A casual attitude toward such things on the part of a student now can cause great trouble later on. I returned with the belief also, that teachers need to stress more the learning of specific laboratory skills, such as the ability to take a synthesis as described in the literature, run it successfully,and then modify it to make related compounds. Related to this is the need to help students become comfortable with the literature of chemistry, to the point that they know how to ferret out information, how to put together information from different sources, and how to present their findings both in written form and orally, all in an independent manner. Since my return, I have been involved in a departmental study of our curriculum, especially a t the junior and senior levels, looking for ways to enlarge on and improve what we do in these areas. Furthermore, I am impressed that we do not do enough to acquaint our students with the c h e m i d industry and the role i t plays in our economy and society today. From simple descriptions of the chemistry of major industrial processes to questions of product safety and public confidence, from questions or profit and prices to descriptions of the chemical bases of environmental concerns, there is a lot more we can do to make our students aware of the scope of national issues that require an understanding of chemistry even to he addressed intelligently. Fourth, I gained a refreshed enthusiasm for my work. The separation in time and space included an escape from the day-to-day whirl of campus life and politics. I found that being 1500 miles away made some burning campus issues seem much less important and earthshaking. While I was gone, many of the things I had been involved in were taken up hy colleagues, and others were resolved. I returned to the unfinished work with fresh vision and a renewed sense of the value of my work. Fifth, I was ahle to experience a new part of the country. The Cajun culture of Louisiana is quite different from the cultural environment of Virginia, and weekends were free for exploration of the area. Sixth, and perhaps, in the long run, most important of all, I gained a group of new friends, not only a t Ethyl, hut also in the Baton Rouge area. Now the question naturally arises as to what Ethyl gained from all of this. I t is a hit presumptuous of me to answer for
them, and I am sure that I gained more than thev: nevertheless, I believe that three things can be said. First, at minimum cost they had a long-pending project activated and carried at least to the point that a patent has heen obtained in the area. I t is too early yet to know whether this technology will he commercialized. but Ethvl now has a natent ~ o s i t & to nrotect further work in the &a. 1was rhalienged 11). the work, hut at no time did 1 feel lost or out date in what 1did. and I felt accepted as an equal by the other research chemists with whom I worked. Second, they had an outsider (with no vested interests) to examine from the inside for over a year the workines of their research labs. Before I left.. mv views were sought,-in frank and open discussions, concerning such things as the morale and ~roductivitvof the nrofessional and technical support staff; the hiring k n e w professionals, the organization and operation of the su~ervisorvstructure. the direction of futuie research, and the plannkg of new facilities. I was certainly not the onlv one consulted on these matters. but I did havei unique to offer, being an "in-house outsider." Third, they had someone whose background and experience was largely in areas other than those in which Ethyl does most of its work. Further, the technical skills I developed were in areas in which only a few people at Ethyl were actively involved. The result was that in informal discussions mv comments were sought concerning the work in progress df other research chemists there, and these chemists appeared to appreciate the suggestions and observations I made. I t would seem to me likely that any large industrial chemistry research group stands to profit in similar ways from an arrangement like the one I had with Ethyl. My experience prompts me to encourage academic chemists to consider applying for year-long industrial sabbaticals and industrial research directors to consider setting up procedures whereby such visitors would he sought out and welcomed. The onlv caution I have tooffer is the sueeestion that all details with respect to such things as dates &-start and stop, salary, fringe benefits, relocation expenses. and vacation time shouid he arranged before the sabbatical begins. I t is difficult to negotiate such matters gracefully once the program starts.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Walt Foster, Frank Conrad, Fred Frey, Gene Robinson. and es~eciallvPaul Ranken for their midance sabbatical year a t ~ t o hCor~l and direct support during poration Research and Development Baton Rouge.
my
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