CCDA Award to Westerner Commercial development of DMS, DMSO, levulinic acid bring award to Crown Zellerbach man "These chemicals have been, known for nearly 100 years, but producing them economically is another matter." Dr. William Montgomery Hearon, 50, v.p. for research and development at Crown Zellerbach Corp., is speaking of dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl sulfoxide, and levulinic acid. In the past five years, and largely under Mont Hearon's guidance, these chemicals have become the majorproducts of the chemical products division of Crown Zellerbach (San Francisco). Their performance has been so impressive as to earn for Dr. Hearon the Honor Award of the Commercial Chemical Development Association for 1965. It will be presented March 16 at a banquet at the Hotel Plaza in New York City. Commercialization of these chemicals, Dr. Hearon says, has been largely a matter of hard work, luck, and having the right people in his organization. But a colleague says there's another important point: Dr. Hearon's salesmanship in steering the paper company into leadership in chemicals that will "eventually comprise an appreciable part of the company's sales and profits." Such an assessment shows every sign today of coming true. One of the three chemicals, dimethyl sulfoxide, is mainly an industrial solvent (such as for spinning synthetic fibers). But within the past year DMSO has shown medical potential of such a broad nature that one member of Crown Zellerbach's board of directors was moved to call it "snake oil." Property. The property that first suggested medical uses for DMSO was its ability to translocate chemicals in plants. The compound turned out also to be able to transport drugs into and through animal systems, and workers at the University of Oregon medical school found while working with the compound that, when applied topically, it also relieves pain. In 1963, Crown Zellerbach signed an agreement on DMSO with the Oregon Board of Higher Education. The medical school does research on the compound and Crown Zellerbach arranges for the licensing of patents filed on inventions thus developed. 90
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CCDA Awardee Hearon
The company and the medical school share the earnings from the program. As with all new and experimental drugs, a good deal of clinical testing remains to be done before DMSO can be cleared for general medical use. If long-term toxicity shows up, for example, this dramatic potential might not be realized. However, DMSO's performance thus far has attracted no less than six licensees. Only one of the six, Syntex Laboratories of Palo Alto, Calif., U.S. subsidiary of Syntex Corp., has been publicly identified. Dr. Hearon received his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 under Dr. E. H. Huntress. He joined Eastman Kodak, then spent three years as a major with the U.S. Army Engineers. After a short stint as an assistant professor at MIT he joined Crown Zellerbach as chief of fundamental research in its central research division. At about that time, Crown Zellerbach and the Soundview division of Scott Paper had finished one of the early conversions from a calcium-based to an ammonium-based sulfite pulp mill, at Lebanon, Ore. This provided an obvious point at which to get started in commercial products from sulfite waste liquor. Studies on the waste liquor resulted in 1952 in Crown Zellerbach's line of Orzan lignin sul-
fonates, which are used as binders and dispersants. By 1955, marketing of the sulfonates by the company's industrial products division, plus research results with DMS, DMSO, and other products, led Crown Zellerbach to form its chemical products division. Dr. Hearon was put in charge. That same year the company began to produce DMS in a semicommercial (1 million pounds per year) plant at Camas, Wash. The company was not without competition in its development of DMS and DMSO. Initially it supplied DMS to Stepan Chemical, which was making DMSO in a small plant. Pennsalt was making DMS. However, by 1960, both Stepan and Pennsalt had backed off. But Dr. Hearon and members of his chemical division were convinced that processes for making DMS from kraft black liquor and DMSO processes piloted at Camas could not be touched for economics. Japanese demand for DMSO was also developing. As a result, in 1959 Crown Zellerbach began to build facilities at Bogalusa, La., a major production site for the company, to make 10 million pounds per year of DMS and 5 million pounds per year of DMSO. The products came into commercial production in the second half of 1961. The chief use for DMS is making DMSO, but it is also used to make sulfonium ion exchange resins and gas odor ants. Levulinic. Levulinic acid showed the company its first potential in 1947 as a raw material for making a solvent for dyeing. It was dusted off again during 1960, and a plant was built at Port Townsend, Wash., to make 5 million pounds per year of the chemical from cellulose waste materials. Output goes mostly to S. C. Johnson & Sons for making diphenolic acid. In 1960, when he became a vice president, Dr. Hearon took charge of all research and development for Crown Zellerbach. Also, he retained over-all management of the chemical products division. In addition to his work in leading Crown Zellerbach's chemical products division and its research and development, Dr. Hearon himself holds 26 patents in 11 countries and currently has two pending. He is an author or co-author of 24 technical articles. And he belongs to many technical societies, including ACS. Dr. Hearon is married and has a son and two daughters. He lives with his family in San Rafael,
Calif.
