Solvay offloads Pipelife stake – New UK spin-out investment fund – EMA confirms orlistat benefits

CHEMICAL – Solvay has agreed to sell its 50% stake in plastic pipe firm Pipelife to Austrian construction products company Wienerberger – which owns the other 50% – for €257 million (£216 million) in cash and assumed debt. Solvay is changing in the wake of its 3.4 billion (£2.8 billion) merger with Rhodia in April 2011. In January, it said it was planning to create a new ‘energy services’ business. Pipelife is based in Vienna, Austria. It employs 2600 people and in 2011 made sales of €800 million.

CHEMICAL – German chemical giant BASF says that formic acid salts are becoming popular as de-icing agents for roads and paths in several Northern European countries, where they are displacing the more familiar gritting material: sodium chloride salt. Formic acid already has a wide range of applications including as a leather tanning agent, an industrial cleaner and an animal feed preservative. The company, which makes up to 255,000 tonnes of formic acid per year, says that the approach is more environmentally friendly – and more efficient. In addition, it says they can be used as a preventative measure when icy conditions are on the way.

CHEMICAL – Venture capital firm MTI has established what it says will be the largest investment fund dedicated to UK university spin-outs. The Orion Fund is targeting £100-150 million in collaboration with three universities: the University of Manchester, the University of Edinburgh and University College London. Previous funds established by MTI have invested heavily in graphene technology.

CHEMICAL – US chemical company Huntsman has officially opened its $40 million (£26 million) Asia Pacific Technology Center in Shanghai, China. The centre will focus on materials that help to save energy and forms part of the existing technology campus opened in September 2008, which will eventually house up to 400 technical experts.

CHEMICAL – DuPont has signed a deal to build a technology hub in Beijing, China, focused on GM corn. The site will employ 50 researchers and make use of the Beijing International Flower Port, a state owned enterprise established in July 2007 in conjunction with the 7th China Flower Expo.

PHARMACEUTICAL – The European Medicines Agency (EMA) says that the benefits of weight loss drug orlistat outweigh the risks. The organisation, which controls drugs in the EU, launched an investigation into the drug – marketed on prescription as Xenical by Roche and over the counter as Alli by GlaxoSmithKline – in August 2011 following reports of liver problems. Orlistat has been on the market in the EU since 1998. Generic versions are now available.

Andrew Turley

                  

Later in the afternoon Bob Root-Bernstein at Michigan State University gave a great presentation on the origins of life. He talked about the idea of molecular complementarity being the chemical starting point that helped put inanimate molecules on the road to forming life. Molecular complementarity is where two distinct chemicals, which could be very different, can reversibly to bind to each other. Root-Bernstein says that when people think of molecular complementarity they often think of large molecules like DNA. He says that when we think about the origins of life we need to think about small molecules coming together; and when they come together they can raise or lower the activation energy of reactions. Glutathione, for instance, can bind to glycine-glycine and protect it from destruction by UV light. These types of reactions could link up to form modules, and he theorises that these modules may have led to certain chemicals being favoured over others in the primordial soup. He points out that hints that this occurred throughout the evolution of life can still be seen today. Insulin, which regulates glucose, has motifs that allow it to bind to the sugar. Insulin can also aggregate into a hexameric barrel, and this could have been the genesis of the first glucose transporter. Even today, similar glucose-binding motifs to those found on insulin can be seen on glucose transporters and receptors. Clearly there’s lots of ifs and maybes here, but it’s a fascinating theory nonetheless.

Root-Bernstein says that he now hopes to search for chemical modules by re-running the Miller-Urey experiments, but increasing their complexity and bringing analytical tools to bear on the products that just weren’t available 60 years ago.

Patrick Walter

                  

Nanopore sequencing bags its first genome
Oxford Nanopore sequences a viral genome and aims to launch its sequencing platforms within the year

Unusual kinetics of catalyst revealed
Understanding the unexpected role of ligands in metal catalysed C-H activation shows that synthetic chemist may need to think quite differently

EPA data decision sparks security row
Will public access online to information about US chemical plants increase or decrease the security risk?

Risk of water pollution by fracking overstated
US researchers determine that groundwater contamination at fracking sites is the result of poor waste management and not the fracking process

                  

The Vancouver Convention Centre, where the AAAS is taking place, plays host to the digital orca, made of glowing plastic cubes

She ran us through her work looking at the contributions Canadian scientists make in nanotechnology and biotechnology throughout their careers and if they’re at their most productive when they’re young. Or do they mature like a fine wine to produce their best work? She notes that since the turn of the 19th century, the age of Nobel laureates has been going up at a rate of 1.6 years per decade. Is this an indicator that scientists are doing their best work later? Obviously, it’s difficult to control for all the different factors that can affect a researcher’s output over the course of their career, such as their position in the community, the grants they manage to secure and the network they build up around them. But she says that the work of younger scientists has more impact on their field but older researchers do tend to be more productive. She does note a more worrying trend though. In the US, the age at which a researcher secures their first National Institutes of Health grant where they are the principal investigator has gone up from 34 in the 1970s to 42 in 2004. If young scientists make the most important breakthroughs in their field, choking off the number in charge of their own projects can only be bad for science as a whole.

Next up, peer review was under the microscope. Is it still relevant in today’s world of electronic communications, pre-prints and open source critiques? The panel certainly thought so. Linda Miller, who has been an editor at both Science and Nature, and is now at the New York University Langone Medical Center, says that the vast majority of authors still think the traditional peer review process improves their work. But she does note that a current of change of sweeping the peer review world. Researchers are less happy with the process going on behind closed doors, reflecting a trend in wider society for greater transparency in decision making. Questions were asked as to whether open peer review – where manuscripts are posted online and reviewers names are comments are known to all – could be the next big thing. There’s certainly advantages, as everything is open and above board, but how could a younger researcher criticise a more established one without damaging their career? The panel feared that it could create a new system of patronage. Miller says that whatever happens, when change comes it could be ‘cataclysmic’. ‘Remember, eight year olds today will become the CEOs of tomorrow,’ she says.

After lunch, Tessa Holyoake, at the University of Glasgow, UK, had an talk on autophagy – the process of breaking down and recycling subcellular components – as a new drug target. The university is now involved in a clinical trial looking at whether an inhibitor of autophagy – the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine – can work synergistically with conventional therapies for chronic myeloid leukaemia. The cell studies look good and the group are putting together more powerful autophagy inhibitors that they hope will be effective in treating cancer.

The day rounded off with a fascinating look at the nanomaterial of the future – nanocellulose. These fibres can be extracted from cellulose and they are as strong as Kevlar and have some interesting properties that mean they could be used in all sorts of applications from batteries, to bioplastics and electronics. And the big advantage of nanocellulose is its abundance. Theodore Wegner, from the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, says that it should be possible to cheaply extract millions of tons of the nanomaterial from wood. He adds that another advantage of nanocellulose is that it doesn’t appear to have any of the toxicity issues that dog other nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes.

Patrick Walter

                  

A great venue with a gloomy backdrop!

He describes himself as a quantum biologist – someone who probes natural structures on the quantum scale to try to understand what makes them tick – and says that we have to learn from millions of years of evolution to improve the ways in which we capture light energy. He points to green sulfur bacteria that live in the Black Sea at a depth of 80m that can still survive by harvesting what little light there is down there. By probing these sorts of light harvesting complexes using ultra-short laser pulses scientists can learn how to more efficiently gather light energy and transfer it to where it is needed.

We were up in the clouds next, as Ravi Ravishankara, director of the chemical sciences divison of the earth system research laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, took us on a whirlwind tour of aerosols. Unfortunately, the effect of aerosols on the climate is still something of a black box, he explains, and we’re missing quite a bit of the information we need. The net effect of aerosols on the climate is thought to be roughly the same as carbon dioxide, thanks to aerosols like black carbon, which can absorb heat, or others which can damage the ozone layer. Vikki Grassian, from the University of Iowa, US, says that the error bars in our understanding of how atomspheric aerosols affect climate are big. She says the problem is complex as aerosols come from so many sources, have different lifetimes, undergo different chemistry, so atmospheric chemists are trying to build a database. Obviously, trying to cover all the aerosols and their reactions would be a sisyphean task. ‘You try to study the most important reactions, you try to use chemical intuition,’ she adds, ‘I’m not going to study methane, it’s not going to do anything, it’s pretty inactive.’ It’s up to chemists, she says, to use their box of analytical tools to work out which reactions are going on and take this to the modellers so they can plug the effects into their models.

Up in the press room we were given a lesson in improving on what Mother Nature has already given us – food crops. We all know more food will be needed in the coming decades to feed a growing global population with increasingly eclectic tastes. Howard Griffiths, professor of plant ecology at the University of Cambridge, UK, is one of the scientists at the forefront of this huge challenge. He’s attempting to ‘turbocharge’ plants to improve yields and is looking at a number of ways to do this. One of the principal ways he’s trying to do this is by changing crop plants like potatoes and wheat to harness carbon dioxide using the C4 pathway – to produce a four carbon organic acid – rather than the less efficient C3 pathway they currently use. This change could increase light harvesting efficiency from 4% to 6% and, although that might not sound like much, is huge if that increase could be carried over into crop yields. He’s also looking at other ways to improve the enzyme Rubisco, which fixes carbon dioxide into sugars, using strategies such as parking it in subcellular components where it can be suffused in more carbon dioxide.

The view from the press room. Chemistry is everywhere!

Richard Cogdell at the University of Glasgow, UK, is pursuing a different strategy and is trying to learn from photosynthesis to make synthetic fuels. They’re trying to use electricity to drive fuel production by harnessing synthetic biology technology. In his group they’re trying to take carbon dioxide and turn it into terpenes – energy dense organic compounds already produced by many plants. They also have the advantage of being immiscible with water, which should make them much easier to harvest than other biofuels such as ethanol. Cogdell describes this

type of work as ‘one of the grand challenges mankind faces’ and says that young researchers need to be enthused and

sold this opportunity to shape the future of the world. I think we can all agree with those sentiments.

Patrick Walter

                  

Flattening the world in Vancouver

So what’s out and about? Well we have another theory on what Stonehenge is all about. Steven Waller studies archaeoacoustics – looking at the role sound may have played in ancient cultures. He thinks Stonehenge and other similar circles – sometimes called piper rings or the giant’s dance – are laid out according to patterns of acoustic interference. It’s an odd one I’ll admit and I only mention it as everyone’s heard all the different theories about the site being some kind of cosmic calendar, or an ancient hospital or a landing site for UFOs.

He dreamed up this idea after noticing that interference patterns can create regular deadening of sound. He found that blindfolded volunteers who were walked around two flutes playing a continuous note in the middle of a field described ‘obstructions’ in the sounds they heard – just like something was in the way. This deadening is down to destructive interference between the sound waves, but ancient cultures would have had no knowledge of this. He theorises that they spotted these patterns, but they appeared ‘magical’ to them, as if there was something hiding in plain sight. He thinks that they went on to design their circles on these patterns. You can listen to him here.

Meanwhile, researchers from the energy institute at the University of Texas, Austin, have been looking into hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking to try to help policy makers separate fact from fiction. In a report, they conclude that fracking is no worse than any other oil or gas extraction process. The problem isn’t so much in forcing apart the shale to release the gas, it’s nearer the surface where faulty well casings and poor cement seals allow contaminated water to taint groundwater – much like other hydrocarbon extraction processes.

The day finished with the incoming AAAS president Nina Fedoroff giving a packed auditorium her inspirational life story. Growing up in a Russian family in the US she said she was given little encouragement to be the best she could be. But she persevered always going that extra mile and pushing for opportunities, until she joined Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock’s group. There she made a name for herself in genetics research, cloning and sequencing one of the first plant genes when others said that there was something about plant genes that made them inimical to being cloned. She shared with the delegates her fears for the future, with a rapidly growing world population, pressures on food, water and other resources. And she made the case that science holds the solution to tackling many of these problems, particularly genetic engineering of plants – an area she has some experience in herself. She decried the slow regulatory process for genetically modified organisms and said that it is a scandal that vitamin A enhanced rice – that could help ward off disease in millions – is still not on the market a decade after it was developed. A good start to the conference and there’s some interesting topics ahead – I’m looking forward to it.

Patrick Walter

                  

But how much should a professor be earning? The chemistry professor at the University of Marburg who filed the lawsuit earns a basic salary of approximately €3900 (£3240) per month – a sum that he and the court agree is inadequate compared with what other civil servants earn.

But is nearly £40,000 per year really too little? How does this compare with pay for professors where you are?

Nina Notman

                  

Pharma industry concerned over budget proposal – DuPont solar deal in China – And BASF bolsters battery portfolio

CHEMICAL – In a bid to reduce exposure to long chain perfluorinated chemicals (LCPFCs), which are toxic and known to bioaccumulate, the US chemical industry has developed over 150 alternatives. In 2006, eight chemical companies signed up to an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) programme to reduce the amount of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and related chemicals in process emissions and products on a global basis by 95% by 2010 and to work toward eliminating them entirely by 2015. Interim results show that Daikin, DuPont, 3M and Solvay Solexis reached the 2010 goal.

PHARMACEUTICAL – US president Barak Obama is threatening hundreds of thousands jobs with ‘short-sighted’ plans, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PHRMA), which has responded to the 2013 budget proposal with disappointment. The organisation, which represents research orientated pharmaceutical companies in the US, is particularly worried about ‘mandatory rebates in Medicare Part D’ and plans to ‘reduce data protection’ for biologics. Obama is looking to save $364 billion (£232 billion) over the next decade through ‘payment innovations and other reforms’ at the Department of Health and Human Services.

PHARMACEUTICAL – Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has requested a 17%, $654 million, increase in its budget, an increase that would take the budget to $4.5 billion in the 2013 presidential proposal. Most of that increase, 98%, would come from fees paid by the pharma industry – and the lion’s share, $364 million, would go towards for regulation of generics and biosimilars. A further $253 million would go towards food safety.

PHARMACEUTICAL – Merck & Co has won US approval for Zioptan (tafluprost), a prostaglandin analogue for reducing pressure in the eye for patients with glaucoma or ocular hypertension. Merck says that Zioptan is the first preservative-free prostaglandin analogue approved in the US. Finnish drug maker Santen has marketed Taflutan (tafluprost) in parts of Europe since 2008. Prostaglastins are lipids derived from fatty acids containing 20 carbon atoms, including a five carbon ring, involved in the regulation of a range of physiological processes.

CHEMICAL – DuPont and Chinese solar energy company Yingli have signed a $100 million deal covering photovoltaic materials. Yingli will buy a range of DuPont products including Solamet photovoltaic metallisation pastes and protective backsheets made from Tedlar polyvinyl fluoride film. DuPont generated $1.4 billion in photovoltaic sales in 2011. The company plans to reach $2 billion in sales by 2014.

CHEMICAL – German chemical giant BASF has bought Ovonic, a US company specialising in nickel–metal hydride (Ni–MH) battery technology. BASF says that Ovionic is ‘the inventor of the Ni-MH technology as it is used today’ and that all the major producers of Ni–MH batteries have signed licensing deals with the company. BASF is building a strong foundation in the battery technology area. In January, the company paid $50 million for a stake in privately owned US company Sion Power, which specialises in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries.

Andrew Turley