Bruce Fu prepares a batch of POSS, which can make plastic stronger, at Hybrid's factory in Hattiesburg, Miss.
Posted on 02/22/2005 4:53:54 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
HATTIESBURG, Miss. - Nanotechnology deals with the tiniest dimensions that engineers have ever worked in to manipulate materials into new products. But entrepreneurs hoping to turn nanoscale innovations into profitable businesses face huge challenges.
That goes a long way toward explaining how officials in this Mississippi city best known as the home of the Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre were able to persuade Hybrid Plastics, one of hundreds of nanotechnology companies founded in recent years, to move here from Southern California.
Mississippi is rarely associated with high technology. Hybrid's new home in an industrial park on Hattiesburg's southern outskirts, a factory built in the early 1980's to make swimming pool chemicals, is surrounded by pine trees and neighbored by a soda bottling plant.
Besides offering a bargain-basement location, Hattiesburg lured Hybrid with the promise of a close relationship with the University of Southern Mississippi's highly regarded polymer chemistry department. Hattiesburg became irresistible when the state promised to make university equipment and laboratory space available at virtually no cost. Lower taxes were a factor, too.
"It's a sweetheart deal," said Joseph D. Lichtenhan, Hybrid's chief executive. "Trying to raise $25 million to duplicate what we get here didn't make business sense." And Dr. Lichtenhan realized there would be other business benefits from leaving a region where nanotechnology companies "are a dime a dozen." Hybrid has just 14 employees locally and sales of under $5 million, but it represents the kind of small business Mississippians view as crucial to overcoming the state's reputation as a business backwater. "There's not a lot of folks here to steal your good employees away," Dr. Lichtenhan added.
It helped that Dr. Lichtenhan, a 41-year-old Kansas native, and his wife felt that this slower-paced, religiously conservative and far less affluent corner of the country would be a good place to raise their three children. Still, Dr. Lichtenhan, who founded Hybrid in 1998 with Joseph J. Schwab, a fellow materials scientist, conceded he was in no rush to give up his home in San Juan Capistrano, seven miles from the Pacific. He still reads his former newspaper, The Orange County Register, online. And his computer is set up for video conferences with Dr. Schwab, who stayed behind with another employee at the company's former headquarters in Fountain Valley, Calif., to work with microchip processing equipment companies on applications for Hybrid's designer molecules.
The term "nanotechnology" comes from the nanometer, which is one-billionth of a meter and the scale in which large molecules, viruses and the building blocks of living cells are measured. Nanotechnology is more than the opening of a technology frontier in one major business like medicine or communications; it is a toolbox for creating previously unimagined materials, like carbon tubes that could replace silicon in electronics; and, in the shorter term, novel high-performance versions of products as diverse as clothing, drugs, microchips and satellites. "Nanotechnology is generating fundamentally new knowledge, and people will figure out how to turn that into money," Dr. Lichtenhan said.
But nanotechnology's business landscape is developing more slowly than the days when analysts joked that all it took for a biotechnology entrepreneur to raise venture capital was a concept, a scientist and a white rat. Nor does it resemble the Internet boom.
Venture capitalists are wary of nanotechnology because innovations take years and millions of dollars to develop and rarely become more than niche products at best.
Small businesses can move rapidly when exploring the opportunities but, in the end, nearly all in nanotechnology have discovered that their ingenuity is often worthless unless larger partners want to incorporate it in their products.
"You can't just be a nanotechnology company," said William P. Moffitt, president and chief executive of Nanosphere, a Northbrook, Ill., start-up focused on medical diagnostics and security products. "You have to be applying it to something and you have to demonstrate value to big companies."
Hybrid's story reflects those pressures. Hybrid makes a family of molecular cages known as polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes, a jaw-breaking moniker that Dr. Lichtenhan replaced in 1999 with the trademarked term, POSS. As Hybrid's name hints, POSS cages mate silicon and carbon compounds to make novel materials that can make plastics stronger, more resistant to heat and better able to block radiation.
As research progressed, Hybrid discovered that varying the chemicals attached to the cages created numerous new potential applications. High-strength dental adhesives and plastic packaging that preserves food without refrigeration are among the first products to contain POSS, but the company said that countless other niches remain to be discovered. "The trick is in making the ice cream cone," said Dr. Lichtenhan, referring to the cages. "What you want to put on top is easier."
Chemists began inadvertently making POSS-like compounds a century and a half ago. General Electric researchers studied their potential extensively for producing superplastics in the 1960's and 70's. But G.E. lost interest when it could not devise a method for precisely controlling their structure in mass production, Dr. Lichtenhan said.
Hybrid thinks it has overcome that challenge by building on research Dr. Lichtenhan encountered as a graduate student at the University of California at Irvine in the late 80's. The path toward POSS's commercialization began with a contract to study their potential for making stronger, lighter, noncombustible aerospace plastics at Edwards Air Force Base in Palmdale, Calif.
"When we started, it took up to three months to make a pound and it cost $5,000," Dr. Lichtenhan said. "The government is the only one that could afford to lead the charge. No one else would be patient enough."
Dr. Lichtenhan said that he and the other Air Force researchers spent three years trying to persuade major chemical companies and scores of other businesses to take over the development effort. Surprised and disappointed by the lack of interest, they decided to strike out on their own with the help of a grant from the government's Advanced Technology Program and money from a few individual investors.
Eventually it became clear that the only way to develop demand for POSS and lower production costs would be to make an end run around bulk plastics and fiber companies to find users whose products could be improved by embedding POSS. In 2000, Dr. Lichtenhan recruited Carl Hagstrom, an experienced technology executive and turnaround expert, to spearhead development.
"We have a lot of hooks in the water," said Mr. Hagstrom, 59, the chief operating officer. They are seeking business partners who are willing to pay Hybrid to work with them.
Meanwhile, life in Mississippi is growing on Dr. Lichtenhan. He has taken up fishing and boating and even found a place to surf - Fort Walton Beach, Fla. "It's two hours away, but the water is warmer than California," he said.
Bruce Fu prepares a batch of POSS, which can make plastic stronger, at Hybrid's factory in Hattiesburg, Miss.
Even when they try to be straight, the NYT is condescending.
(((MS PING)))
I just hope the yankess don't hear about or believe how great
life is here in MS.
I thought Favre was from Kiln, MS. Not Hattiesburg.
I thought Favre was from Kiln, MS. Not Hattiesburg.
He is.
You ARE reading the NY Times don't you know?
He is from Kiln, but his home now is Hattiesburg.
"Mississippi is rarely associated with high technology."
Well, maybe not by the NYT but...
- The Jackson-Clinton metropolitan area in south central Mississippi is the largest single conglomeration of high-tech telecommunications and wireless companies in America, with more than 300 such firms calling the state capital region home.
- Statewide, more than 10,000 Mississippians are employed in telecom jobs, as Mississippi has become a virtual "who's who" roll call of top firms in that sector: WorldCom, SkyTel, Tritel/SunCom, Air2Lan, WirelessOne and Telepak/Cellular South, just to name a few.
- The University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg is one of the top 10 graduate schools in the nation for polymer sciences and is home to the internationally recognized Mississippi Polymer Institute.
- Mississippi has more than 84,800 miles of fiber optics in place with more being put in the ground every day. This mileage total relative to population density is among the highest in the nation.
- Two of the US Department of Defense's four major shared computer resource centers are located in Mississippi, making the state a national leader in super-computing power.
- The Mississippi FiberNet 2000 project was the nation's first fiber optic, fully interactive, two-way distance learning network operated over public telephone switched facilities.
http://www.siteselection.com/features/2001/jan/ms/
http://www.mississippi.org/why_ms/telecom.htm
Thanks for the info. I did not know that.
"I just hope the yankess don't hear about or believe how great
life is here in MS."
Unfortunately, this is one instance where
the NYT will report a positive story.
That's a rarity.
I think he's moved from Kiln to Hattiesburg.
The shopping is better there. ;o)
Dixie bump!
"USACE"
What's that?
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Thanks!
So if Bruce opens a drinking establishment, will he call it Fu Bar?
That far south, why don't they just say he's whuppin' up a mess o' POSSum.
Quiet! Please! The snow-birds may see that.
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