May 2003 | Archive

Innovators
Though their disciplines and discoveries differ, the winners of our secon annual Pittsburgh Innovators Awards shine a light on scientific discovery.

Photography by Blaine Stiger

Pittsburgh has given the world many discoveries and innovations over the past two centuries. Hence, we’ve become a major research and development hub—and home to scores of brilliant scientists and thinkers. Nevertheless, R&D has remained an underappreciated activity here. That’s the purpose of Pittsburgh magazine’s second-annual Pittsburgh Innovators Awards: to shed the spotlight on the best and brightest homegrown ideas and technologies. With the help of a distinguished panel of local experts , we looked in a variety of disciplines for discoveries that have met the test of scientific peer review and/or the marketplace.We’ve selected four current innovations to highlight, as well as one from Pittsburgh history. In the following pages, read their inspiring stories and gain a renewed respect for the brain power residing right here in Western Pennsylvania.

Chemical Reactions: Adding to the Scientific Toolbox
“It’s like Velcro,” says Dr. Dennis Curran, explaining how his “fluorous” techniques work to separate chemical compounds in a chemical reaction. And just as the world has found innumerable uses for the restickable fabric, the medical industry is the first of many beginning to discover the potential of the work of this University of Pittsburgh chemist, researcher and professor who also holds the title of Bayer Professor of Chemistry.

Curran, 49, and the company he founded in 2001, Fluorous Technologies Inc., are solving a time-consuming and expensive problem and making it easier for scientists to make advances in many areas of medical research.

“The easy thing to do is the reaction; however, it’s hard to separate the product from the reaction,” says Curran, a Point Breeze resident.

To create a new compound, additional substances known as reagents are introduced to chemicals to cause a chemical reaction. After they react, the challenge is to get the reagent out while leaving the final product intact.

Previously, this separation required many steps, many reactions and a lot of time and money. But with fluorous technologies, chemical tags use the element fluorine to identify a type of molecule—often an undesirable reagent—and then extract it after a reaction has been performed.

What used to take hours, even weeks, now takes just a few minutes. After running the mixture through a layer of a white powdery “Velcro” substance that will capture all of the tagged molecules, the scientist is left with a new compound and no extra material.

“It’s rare that a fundamentally new tool comes along,” Curran says of the tags, which are beginning to gain a foothold in the biotechnology/pharmaceutical industry.

“It can solve problems that couldn’t be solved before. And our solution is just easier,” Curran says, comparing his product with those already in use. “I think this is going to take its place in the tool box.” Companies like Merck, Pfizer and Genentech are already using the technologies in the development of new drugs.

Fluorous tags also have untapped potential on a much larger scale—literally. “In the long run, we think it’s going to be a winner in large-scale chemical production,” Curran says. Nonpharmaceutical industries use reactions to make products such as plastics or polymers. And just like drug companies, they have to run and rerun reactions to purify their final product, but they do so with much more
material than a drug company.

Curran’s technologies will enable
them to significantly reduce the amount of waste they produce, and his “Velcro” is entirely reusable. “It saves money, but it’s also good for the environment. Our technology will be used and put back in a drum [to use again] instead of burning it or burying it in a landfill.”

By expanding its product to a multitude of industries, Harmarville-based Fluorous Technologies projects it could generate $50 million in sales within four years.
—Elizabeth Speed

Detecting a New Billion-Dollar Biotech Industry
Dr. Alan Waggoner’s technology can find life in space or unlock the secrets of life on earth. Using fluorescent dyes, Waggoner enables scientists to look at living cells in their natural environment rather than isolated on a microscope slide. It’s like being able to watch a movie instead of looking at a snapshot of a subject.

“Fluorescence detection is one of the most powerful ways of detecting things in the biomedical science field, and there’s a multibillion-dollar industry based on [fluorescence detection] to back up that importance,” says Waggoner, 61, of Schenley Farms in Oakland. He and his team work on a variety of projects, from imaging systems to special microscopes, that explore how cells function—and malfunction. Waggoner has worked primarily on the development of biosensors using florescent dyes, which distinguish and illuminate structures within cells. When customized and added to a biological sample, researchers can see how the cell is working, and track its movements and changes without removing it from its environment.

When researchers are able to isolate a type of cell, they can diagnose a range of diseases. For example, a doctor can tell what stage of HIV a patient is in by looking at the ratio of certain types of white blood cells in the blood. By using the dyes, the cells are quickly identified for diagnosis, and insights gained can be applied in the search for the cure. The technology allows researchers to watch cancer develop and spread, or tag stem cells to observe their regenerative capabilities.

Alan Waggoner is also working with research colleagues to understand gene expression and the human genome. Within DNA, genes make up a list of instructions: If the gene is active, or “on,” the instruction held within it will be carried out; a gene that is “off” is dormant. Waggoner and his team have developed a method using fluorescence that enables researchers to tell the physiological state of a gene. Waggoner cites an example of the method’s utility in a cancer cell. Cancer affecting a stationary cell can “switch on” the genes that instruct movement, thus spreading the cancer.

“What we are already doing is pretty fantastic; if we can make the biosensors and the micro-detection on Mars work, that would be fantastic,” Waggoner says of a CMU/NASA-sponsored project, based in CMU’s Robotics Institute, he’s working on to find life in space. He and his team are developing fluorescent dyes that can adhere to the basic molecules that would be found in a life form. He’s also working on a tool that can detect the very faint fluorescence of that dye when it hooks up with microscopic life on another planet.

“These dyes will continue to become more important for detection systems in diagnostics,” Waggoner says, explaining that they can enable automated systems that make diagnosis easier and more accurate. They also enable imaging systems that can identify specific cells and track them within a biological system—a living mouse, for example. “We are developing dyes in the infrared region of the spectrum,” he says. “Right now you can only see a little way. With the infrared dyes, it will be possible to see much deeper.”
—Elizabeth Speed

Lycos: How Spiderman tackled the World Wide Web
When looking for one specific piece of information among the billions of sites on the World Wide Web, most people don’t think twice about turning to a search engine for help in sifting through it all. Yet, nine short years ago, the idea of a comprehensive, user-friendly catalog of the Internet was still a radical idea—until one Carnegie Mellon University researcher had a brainstorm.

Dr. Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin developed Lycos at the CMU Center for Machine Translation beginning in May 1994. “[In 1994] people were just getting used to the idea that they could share info with everybody,” says Mauldin. “We had a flood, a tidal wave of stuff.” But no one had a way to find anything, says Mauldin, who has a master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

Lycos originally consisted of three pages of code written by John Leavitt, a CMU staff member. Mauldin bought the code from Leavitt and wrote another 200 pages to go with the original three. (Leavitt later worked for Lycos Inc.) It was a revolutionary program named for the Latin name for the wolf spider (lycosidae). Like that spider, Lycos did not sit passively on the Web waiting for information to arrive. Lycos was actively stalking it, thus building an index more rapidly than other programs and finding more important information first. “That intelligence was my contribution to information-retrieval services on the Web,” says Mauldin.

Lycos launched with a catalog of 54,000 documents, and less than a month later, the service had amassed more than 390,000 documents in its catalog. And unlike other crawler-based search engines at the time, which usually just provided links to Web pages, Lycos also offered brief descriptions of each document along with a match score. In 1995, Lycos went corporate, becoming the first search engine to accept paid ads. Mauldin stayed on as chief scientist until 1996, when he retired. “After two years of mind-numbing effort, I was pretty much used up,” he says.

He did have enough energy to co-found Virtual Personalities Inc., now known as Conversive Inc., in 1997. The California-based company develops verbally enabled software robots. Mauldin recently resigned as chairman of the company’s board. “As you can tell, I don’t like to be in charge,” laughs Mauldin. “I like to start them and go on.”

What the 44-year-old moved on to is robot fights. After seeing the Comedy Central program “Battlebots” in 2000, Mauldin decided to try his hand at it. He and his family (wife Debbie, daughters Jacey and Kelsey, and son, Danny), aka “Team Toad,” even made it to the quarterfinals of “Battlebots.”

In December, Mauldin opened the Robot Club & Grille in North Huntingdon as a facility where robot enthusiasts could try out their robots in competitions and grab a bite to eat. “It was a hard idea to sell to my wife,” laughs Mauldin, but now she has a robot of her own. (The club closed its doors in April.)

For now, the North Huntingdonresident is focusing on his robot-fighting future and then it’ll be on to the next challenge.
—Joyce DeFrancesco

Beat Generation: The Story of the Heart Defibrillator

Is innovation a product of nature or nurture? The stories of Dr. Alois A. Langer and Dr. M. Stephen Heilman suggest that the answer may be both, plus a little luck.

Langer followed in the footsteps of his father, Alois, a retired Westinghous engineer and inventor who, he says, “always encouraged me to do something that would work for the benefit of people.” Heilman came from a family of physicians. In 1972, Heilman, 38 (now 69), was on a business trip to Singapore when he ran into Michel Mirowski, a Baltimore cardiologist. Mirowski had patented an implantable defibrillator, which could correct otherwise-fatal abnormal heart rhythms, but had been unable to find a firm to help him perfect and market it. Heilman was the founder of a medical device firm called Medrad Inc. The two teamed up with biomedical engineer Langer and Baltimore cardiopulmonary researcher Morton Mower.

Challenges included designing a battery that would work for years inside the human body, figuring out how a 9-ounce device could monitor the heart’s electrical activity and administer shocks as needed, and finding materials the body’s immune system wouldn’t reject. In 1980, they successfully implanted a defibrillator—and almost had heart failure themselves. Once they’d implanted the device, they tested it by artificially inducing a potentially fatal arrhythmia. The defibrillator “took about 30-plus seconds or so” to restart the patient’s heart, says Heilman. Attending physicians were seconds away from giving up and jump-starting the heart with shock paddles. Finally, says Heilman, “the device kicked in and did shock and did correct the rhythm.”

Today, at least 300,000 of the devices are helping hearts, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s, keep the beat. Heilman, of South Buffalo Township, Armstrong County, eventually went on to found several companies, including O’Hara-based Lifecor Inc. That company just released a wearable defibrillator that straps on to the patient’s chest and requires no surgery. “It will be an alternative to the implantable,” says Heilman.

Langer, 58, a Forest Hills resident, is the founder and chief scientist at Greensburg’s Cardiac Telecom, which makes and administers portable telemetry units. The units monitor a patient’s heart activity at home and transmit data to Cardiac Telecom. The company monitors the data and provides it to treating physicians or, in the worst case, calls an ambulance.“I love seeing something work for the first time,” Langer says.
—Rich Lord

Taking on the aluminum challenge
In his college graduation picture, Charles Martin Hall looks more like a 12-year-old boy than a chemist about to change the world. That is until you look into those dark, steady eyes. Those eyes were looking for answers. And following his graduation in 1885 from Oberlin College in Ohio, he was, by God, going to get the answer to a very particular mystery that had been bugging him. A couple of years earlier, his chemistry professor, Frank Jewett, had held up a piece of silvery metal and announced to his class, “Any person who discovers a process by which aluminum can be made on a commercial scale will bless humanity and make a fortune for himself.” To a young man who had been tinkering with chemicals since he was barely in double digits, the challenge was too delicious. “I’m going for that metal,” he told his classmates.

But there was a problem. After oxygen and silicon, aluminum is the most abundant element on earth. Dig up a shovelful of dirt, and nearly a tenth of it will be aluminum. The problem is that it mixes chemically with nearly anything: sand, rock, oxygen—you name it. So Hall faced a challenge: how to extract aluminum from everything else.

For months, Hall labored in the wooden-shed laboratory he had constructed behind his family’s house. He tried every conceivable way to extract the recalcitrant metal from rock and clay, but few methods worked, and those that did were too difficult to have any commercial value. Then he struck upon the idea of using electrolysis, the application of electricity to rearrange molecules in such a way that the aluminum separates itself from the elements it had bonded with.

On Feb. 23, 1886, Hall connected homemade zinc batteries he had made with the help of Jewett and his older sister Julia to graphite-rod electrodes and dipped them into a tiny crucible filled with a solution of aluminum oxide in molten cryolite. The electric current cooked the mixture for hours. When Charles returned and broke the cooled material open, there before him lay several silvery buttons of pure aluminum.

He had done it.

Hall wasted no time patenting the process and looking for investors. He finally found six, 200 miles east in Pittsburgh, headed up by industrialist Capt. Alfred Hunt. Together they formed the Pittsburgh Reduction Co. and built a small plant in what is now the Strip District. In 1888, Hall made the first inexpensive commercial-grade aluminum, and the world was soon beating a path to his Strip District door. For its weight, aluminum was both light and strong, it conducted heat beautifully, and it tenaciously resisted corrosion. Henry Ford changed it into Model T parts, and the Wright brothers transformed it into engine components used to get the world’s first aeroplane off the ground.

Eventually the business changed its name to the Aluminum Company of America and then later to Alcoa. Today it has 139,000 employees working in 31 countries, and a very handsome corporate headquarters with a wavy facade made of aluminum on Pittsburgh’s North Shore. With his new process, Charles Martin Hall had not only extracted mere metal, he also had extracted an entire industry.
—Chip Walter