Tag: Spectroscopy

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When Research was Research and Business was Commerce

Prologue

I carried out my tertiary education, postdoctoral research, and work life during the remarkable period described below. It is the milieu over which I performed the research program described here. Using this example (1989 to 1999) I’ll illustrate how Research Management has come to set agendas for research by becoming arbiters of the productivity of researchers. I intend this article as a warning and a call for researchers to reclaim research by rediscovering “when research was research.”

Used to be — “back in the day” — ca. 1976 when I studied chemistry at the University of NSW, there was a Faculty of Applied Science and a Faculty of Science, occupying some of the most impressive buildings. There was a Faculty of Commerce but no Faculty of Business [1]. The word entrepreneur was hardly ever heard and the richest business people were known as tycoons. The aging J. Paul Getty, an oil baron, was the richest man in the world in the mid-1970s. In Australia, some of the richest men were media and press moguls Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. Another notable wealthy-figure was the iron-ore mining magnate Lang Hancock (the father of Gina Rinehart). None of this would have much interested me. It was research that was my interest. As I will show in this article.

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Forty Years Since the Unsolved Tylenol Murders

This article is about the unsolved Tylenol and copycat poisonings with cyanide in painkiller capsules. My involvement in the case was as an analytical chemist to develop rapid methods for analyses of the potentially millions of suspect products recalled from shelves of drugstores. The hope was that such chemical testing might give clues to investigators concerning the distribution of tainted products that could lead to an arrest.

It’s been 40 years since seven people died from cyanide poisoning from adulterated extra-strength Tylenol tablets. The victims had purchased bottles of Tylenol, on store shelves, in suburban Chicago. A completely ordinary thing to do. They were tragically unaware of tampering by an unknown attacker who had replaced the contents of the pills with cyanide [1]. It was a shocking incident that completely changed sales and production of pharmaceuticals. Today, we take for granted the safety of drugs and medicines because they’re produced in tamper-evident blister packs or sealed bottles. This was not the case before 1982.

Unfortunately, this incident attracted copycat attacks in the years that followed. It was after such a copycat attack in 1984, this time on a different brand of painkillers in Westchester County, NY, that I became involved. I was at Indiana University, Department of Chemistry, Bloomington IN and I had become friends with my office-mate, now Professor Robert Lodder (at the University of Kentucky, College of Pharmacy). Rob was working on combining Near-infrared Spectroscopy with intelligent algorithms, using statistics and mathematics, for an enhanced interpretation of the data.

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