Marketing men try computer Nearly 200 top chemical marketing men played a management game in San Francisco's historic Mark Hopkins Hotel last week. The players had come to learn how computers can help reduce the risks involved in making marketing decisions. By midweek, the stream of executives leaving the meeting, sponsored jointly by the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Marketing and Economics and the Commercial Chemical Development Association, was plainly stimulated but a bit troubled. They had learned that the road to lower risk is likely to be long, tortuous, and expensive. The new products produced by industrial R&D are giving customers a growing number of products—often interchangeable—to choose among. This is an uncomfortable condition for the marketer, since his task becomes more complex and expensive. New product marketing efforts based pretty much on "best guesses" and similar seat-of-the-pants approaches are falling short. Hence the CCDA/CM&E management game, invoking operations research, mathematical models, and venture analysis. Many hurdles must be surmounted before scientific methods become a major force in marketing. Varian Associates' Charles W. McClelland says that too many industrial practitioners of operations research are techniqueoriented when they should be more intent on defining early in the game what the important marketing problems are. Plain-spoken Dr. McClelland recommends that development of operations research techniques be left to the universities. Industry marketing people, he says, should learn what the techniques are all about and then find a way to communicate with the operations research people with whom they're working.
Expert McClelland Many hurdles to top
Semantics, as always, are important. The technical meanings of words, at least to an operations analyst, can be quite different from common meanings as intended by marketing people. Industry would be well advised to seek out people who are problem oriented and can communicate clearly, Dr. McClelland declares, to do this kind of work. The cost of developing a competitive edge is likely to be high, both in time and money. Building a comprehensive marketing model for a company can consume several man-years. To marketing people, geared to the fast pace of everyday marketing activities, such time involvement spells high cost. Arthur D. Little's George B. Hegeman confirms that in actual dollars the cost of building effective marketing models can be high. Full-blown efforts costing as much as $100,000 aren't unknown. Generally speaking, the higher the stakes, the greater the cost of developing useful marketing models. But the cost of failure today is so high that the cost of minimizing the decision-making risks pales in comparison.
Phosphate found off N.C. coast Duke University marine geologists have discovered a "vast" deposit of phosphate rock off the coast of North Carolina. Dr. Orrin H. Pilkey, assistant professor of geology, says the find is about 30 miles off the coast in central Onslow Bay (between Cape Fear and Cape Lookout). The deposit covers at least 20 square miles
on the continental shelf under 60 to
Camera device A vast deposit of phosphate
ing the new find is still unknown. TGS's deposit, even though on land, is already more difficult to get at than phosphate deposits in Florida. The on-shore phosphate rock in North Carolina lies from 85 to 200 feet underground, and some of it is underwater or in swampy land. By contrast, the Florida deposits are 5 to 40 feet underground. The water covering Dr. Pilkey's find is thus an enormously complicating factor. Scientists from Woods Hole Océanographie Laboratory earlier found nodules that contain manganese, radium, uranium, copper, cobalt, nickel,
It p r o b a b l y d a t e s
a n d h e a v y sands a b o u t 100 miles off
back 15 to 30 million years. Dr. Pilkey heads a recently established group in marine geology at the Duke marine laboratory at Beaufort. One of the programs under way at the laboratory is a survey of mineral deposits off the southeast coast of the U.S. One tool they're using is an underwater camera device that's operated from the deck of the Duke research vessel Eastward (see cut). The device is used to help assess bottom sediments and formations. Companies such as Texas Gulf Sulphur, Magnet Cove Barium, and North Carolina Phosphate Co. have also investigated on-shore phosphate deposits in North Carolina. TGS, in fact, has already shipped its first load of phosphate rock from Aurora, N.C. (C&EN, April 11, page 19). The deposit being commercially worked by TGS and the new off-shore find may be part of the same deposit. They're about the same age, Dr. Pilkey says. The commercial feasibility of min-
the coast of North Carolina (at the Blake Plateau). They also found a band of phosphate 10 to 20 miles wide at the junction of the plateau and the upper continental shelf.
100 feet of w a t e r .
ASP still blocks negotiations American Selling Price (ASP) continues to pose a major stumbling block to the success of the Kennedy round of trade negotiations, commissioner Jean Rey of the European Economic Community said last week in Washington, D.C. During a whirlwind two-day visit with U.S. officials, Mr. Rey told newsmen that "no solution was reached on the ASP problem." But Mr. Rey is optimistic that a solution can be worked out. "I don't believe that the EEC and the U.S. have reached an impasse on ASP/' Mr. Rey told C&EN. "True, we haven t found a solution to the problem as yet. But we [EEC] are now considering MAY 30, 1966 C&EN
23
Patent to issue on cloud seeders
EEC's Jean Rey No impasse seen
Editor Burger Two possible solutions
new proposals from the U.S., and I have every reason to be optimistic that a solution to this problem will be reached." ASP is the controversial system of import valuation by which duties on imports of benzenoid chemicals and a number of other product groups are assessed on the basis of American selling price, rather than their foreign value. The system has long been a thorn in the side of European chemical producers. The U.S. negotiating team had hoped to auction off ASP chiefly for EEC concessions on U.S. farm goods. But bowing to pressure from Congress, Christian Herter, the President's special representative for trade negotiations, recently conceded publicly that ASP is not negotiable under the 1962 Trade Expansion Act authorization, and that any concessions on ASP must be approved by Congress. "The crisis in the Community [EEC] is over," Mr. Rey says. Not only has France come back into the fold, he points out, but agreement on common agricultural prices within the community has been reached. He feels that EEC will be ready by September to begin the final six months of Kennedy round negotiations.
the National Institutes of Health) which support the research, according to Dr. Burger, who is also professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia. Seven or eight years ago, academic scientists supported by federal research grants routinely submitted their compounds to the pharmaceutical industry for screening, Dr. Burger explains. But federal legal opinion now holds that the patent rights on drugs and related compounds synthesized or studied with the support of federal grants may be claimed by the Government's supporting agency. As a result, the industry has stopped screening such potential medicinal agents. The number of compounds which are candidates for more detailed, or perhaps even clinical, study has thus declined very sharply, the JMC editor points out. The number of drugs introduced as novel therapeutic agents is therefore low—out of all proportion to the billion-dollar investment that has gone into therapeutic synthesis and evaluation. And this doesn't take into account the stringent regulations of the Food and Drug Administration. If fundamental drug research is to grow or even survive in this country, something must be done soon, Dr. Burger emphasizes. He suggests two possible solutions: industry-supported testing institutes, or testing facilities provided by federal government agencies which now support medicinal research. A partial solution to the screening problem, however, may stem from the McClelland patent bill, says the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. The Senate patent subcommittee has approved this bill, which PMA generally supports (C&EN, March 28, page 26). The bill would establish a single flexible policy, Governmentwide, on whether the Government or the contractor should get the rights to federally financed inventions.
Patent conflict blocks drug tests A conflict between the pharmaceutical industry and the Government has blocked testing of thousands of promising drug compounds made in schools, Dr. Alfred Burger, editor of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, said last week at a meeting of the ACS Norwich subsection. The bottleneck results from a dispute on patent rights between the pharmaceutical industry, which tests the potential drugs, and the legal branches of federal agencies (such as 24 C&EN MAY 30, 1966
Claims covering minerals such as silica as cloud seeding agents have been allowed by the Patent Office and a patent will issue soon to Dr. Albert C. Zettlemoyer and coworkers at Lehigh University. The nucleating agents have a particle size of 0.01 to 0.10 micron. Their surface layer is mainly hydrophobic; but 5 to 40% of the surfaces are covered with hydrophilic sites. Such particles promote crystallization of a hydrogenbonded crystal from a gaseous medium—ice from water vapor, for instance. Dr. Zettlemoyer is now seeking additional patent coverage, having developed a process to modify the surface of silica and similar substrates by burning an ionic salt (sodium chloride and potassium iodate are two examples) with silicon. X-ray crystallization studies show that burning ionic salts with silicon enhances crystal formation. Crystals begin forming at 600° to 800° C. during the burning process. The normal crystal-forming range of silica is from 1000° to 1250° C. The resulting product has a hydrophobic surface with patches of hydrophilic sites along 7 to 37% of the surface layer. Under laboratory conditions, some of these nucleating materials promote ice formation at —2° C. Silver iodide, the most effective cloud seeding agent found to date,
Lehigh's Zettlemoyer Patches, not single sites
