U.K. firm applies gene methods to agriculture The application of genetic engineering and biotechnology to agriculture is the thrust of a new U.K. venture, Agricultural Genetics Co. (AGC), headquartered in Cambridge. The company is starting out with a modest $1 million or so provided for the most part by its three backers—Advent, a venture capital concern; British Technology Group, a U.K. state agency; and Ultramar, a U.K. oil company. Within the next couple of years, however, the aim is to raise the sum to around $23 million contributed by the three founding shareholders and additional partners. Roger Gilmour, AGCs 41-year-old chief executive and until recently president of Chicago-based Griffith Laboratories, a food technology company, reveals some of the areas on which he and his fledgling staff will concentrate. These areas include nonconventional plant breeding techniques, biological control of pests and weeds, and the search for new varieties of plants and flowers. His company will draw largely on the expertise and findings of scientists at the British governmentsponsored Agricultural Research Council's laboratories in Cambridge. Gilmour admits that it could take the best part of a decade to launch new products, although he is hopeful that some ideas can be brought to the marketplace in a year or two. He cites as an example microbial inoculants for the protection of plants against insects. But it's hardly surprising that he and AGCs chairman Alan Robertson, w h o headed agricultural product sales at Imperial Chemical Industries before he retired last year, decline to project company sales or profits for the coming five or 10 years. "AGC will be complementary to existing major companies in the agricultural and agrochemical field/' notes Brian Willott, who heads British Technology Group. "It will be a technology bridge between public sector invention and private sector exploitation. Potential rewards are enormous, though the time scales are likely to be long."
For BTG, whose role is to help bring technical discoveries in Britain to commercial fruition, this is the second venture into biotechnology. Three years ago, it backed the launching of Celltech for developing and marketing genetic engineering and hybridoma technology applied mainly to human needs. Celltech, indeed, parallels AGC in that Celltech has direct links with the U.K. Medical Research Council's molecular biology laboratory in Cambridge. D
Top executives change at Monsanto, Celanese The shakeup in chemical industry top management continues. After Ray R. Irani's defection from the Olin presidency to become chairman of Occidental Chemical (C&EN, June 27, page 5), two top executives are leaving Monsanto and Celanese well before retirement age. They are John W. Hanley, 61, chairman and chief executive officer at Monsanto; and Allan R. Dragone, 57, president and chief operating officer at Celanese. The move at Monsanto doesn't surprise Wall Streeters, who have viewed Hanley as making a slow departure over the past two years after b r i n g i n g in a y o u n g new
president. However, the shift at Celanese is a surprise, leading to speculation that it was forced after major operation problems, including poor investments, in the past few years. Monsanto's Hanley will resign his posts effective Sept. 1, but will remain chairman of the firm's executive committee until March 1,1984. "After my retirement early next year," Hanley says, "I will remain a director while pursuing my longplanned intention of devoting myself to a number of outside business and charitable interests." Under the change in management at Monsanto, the title of chief executive officer no longer will go along with the chairman's position, but will reside with the president. Richard J. Mahoney, 49, who has been Monsanto's president since 1980 and chief operating officer since 1981, will become the chief executive officer. Mahoney has been with Monsanto since 1962 and has worked his way up through a number of positions in plastics and agricultural chemicals. Louis Fernandez, who has been vice chairman since 1980 and a member of the board since 1971, will become chairman. At Celanese, Dragone's resignation was effective immediately. The company says that Dragone, who has been president and chief operating officer since 1980, "plans to pursue opportunities in other areas of
Monsanto's Mahoney (left), Celanese's Macomber to wear additional hats August 1, 1983 C&EN
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News of the Week business interest." A spokesman for Celanese says that Dragone has made no decision, but "is looking at several possible avenues." John D. Macomber, Celanese chairman and chief executive officer, has been elected to the additional post of president. Macomber points out that the company has decentralized its operations into four operating companies. "We have now reached the point where we can effectively combine the chief executive and chief operating officer positions." So he will wear the two hats. D
GAF abandons plan to liquidate itself In yet another sharp reversal of course, GAF has dropped its plan to liquidate itself (C&EN, May 2, page 7). The announcement by chairman Jesse Werner came after the company and Allied Corp. agreed to end a pact under which Allied was to buy GAF's chemicals group for about $410 million. Allied abandoned the preliminary purchase plan because it could not satisfy itself that, in acquiring GAF's chemical assets, it also would not risk assuming some of GAF's asbestos-related liabilities. The company is a codefendant in about 12,300 pending lawsuits. In addition, GAF was uncertain it would be able to
Werner: future will be profitable 6
August 1,1983 C&EN
distribute the proceeds of the sale to its shareholders upon liquidation. On July 7, the first part of GAF's liquidation—the sale of its building products unit—foundered when Southwestern General Corp. of Evergreen, Colo., the prospective buyer, backed out. Southwestern General explained that it withdrew because of the uncertain status of GAF's ongoing proxy battle, in which the incumbent management led by Werner is fighting a dissident slate led by Samuel J. Heyman. GAF now is talking with Odyssey Partners, a group of former executives of the Wall Street securities house Oppenheimer & Co., which had proposed itself as a backup buyer for the building products unit earlier this year. "We intend to complete the sale of our building materials group to Odyssey Partners as expeditiously as possible and apply the proceeds to reduction of our debt, which will
enhance our ability to again pay a dividend on our common stock," Werner says. "Our shareholders' best interests will be realized through GAF's future as a very profitable, publicly held, 'stand-alone' specialty chemicals company." GAF has not paid a dividend on common stock for the past two quarters. GAF's second-quarter sales rose to more than $183 million, 12% higher than a year earlier. The development comes as GAF management and the Heyman dissidents prepare for the next leg of their bitter duel, hearings on Heyman's appeal of a June court ruling that threw out the first proxy vote this year. In that decision, a federal district court judge ruled that shareholders should have been told more about Heyman's family-business legal problems before the vote. Heyman contends that the vote gave his slate the victory. The first hearing is scheduled for Aug. 9. G
Sohio, chemical group fund university research Companies that need well-educated chemists continue to come to the aid of financially strapped science programs at research universities by providing awards and grants to support scientific research and education. Two of the latest announcements of grants of this type come from Standard Oil (Ohio), which has selected five universities to receive $10 million in new awards through the company's centers for scientific excellence program, and the Council for Chemical Research, a consortium of chemical companies whose purpose is to increase interaction between resesarch universities and companies that employ chemists and chemical engineers. CCR's recently announced grants for this year are up 15% from the support they provided last year. The Sohio grants, which become final when negotiations are completed between the company and the universities involved, provide $2 million to each university over a five-year period for direct support of research. The award recipients, chosen after more than 1000 research proposals were considered, are the University of Cincinnati for a cen-
ter in membrane technology, the University of Illinois, Urbana, for a center in crop molecular genetics and genetic engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a center in offshore engineering, Pennsylvania State University for a center in mining technology, and Stanford University for a center for forecasting petroleum reservoir performance. The projects were chosen by a panel headed by Frank Press, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and including three Sohio scientists and two other outside scientists. Excellence, support, and training of scientists, collaboration with Sohio, and innovative research were some of the criteria used to choose the award recipients. The Council for Chemical Research's $590,000 was distributed to 141 Ph.D.-granting universities in the form of unrestricted grants for basic research in the chemical sciences and engineering. Grant money came from seven chemical companies: Air Products & Chemicals, Dow Chemical, Exxon, Lubrizol, Monsanto, Rohm & Haas, and Stauffer Chemical. D
