werner mueller
TRANSCRIPT
HOW MANY INDUSTRIAL CHEM-ists have climbed the corporate ladder out of the lab and into management, only to find themselves looking back wist
fully on their days at the bench, fantasizing about returning there?
Werner H. Mueller actually did it. In 1998, Mueller capped a 30-year career in industry by setting up CHD Technologies, a one-chemist shop in Charlotte, N.C., that conducts process R&D for agricultural and pharmaceutical intermediates. He did it with equipment salvaged from his former employer, Hoechst Celanese, and so far he's having fun.
Mueller, 64, grew up in Germany's Lower Bavaria region and traces his process chemistry abilities to his years on a farm there. "If you can't problem solve on a farm, you are out of business in very short order," he says.
He earned his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich, studying organic chemistry as well as technical chemistry which he calls "process engineering for chemists." Mueller came to the U.S. in 1967 for a postdoctoral fellowship in medicinal chemistry at Temple University After meeting his future wife, Janice, in Philadelphia, he decided to pursue full-time employment in the states.
Monsanto's nylon intermediates business in Pensacola, Fla., was looking for researchers and hired Mueller after he convinced the firm that his education enabled him to work harmoniously with chemical engineers. There, he helped commercialize a new process, still in use today for making adiponitrile via electrohydrodimerization ofacrylonitrile.
Janice was interested in living overseas while still young and able to learn a new language. So, after four years at Monsanto, the couple moved to Germany where Mueller embarked on a 25-year career with Hoechst.
His assignments in Germany—leader of an R&D group developing a new route to resorcinol, assistant to the Hoechst board member responsible for R&D, research in waterless offset printing—kept him close to the lab. And even after moving back to the U.S. in 1984, Mueller says
his work improving a monochloroacetic acid plant in Baton Rouge, La., and managing fluorine chemistry R&D in Coventry, R.I., was fairly hands-on.
But in 1988, Hoechst acquired Celanese, and Mueller was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas. He became associate director of R&D for Hoechst Celanese's advanced technology group and, later, technical director for the chemical group—jobs that took him out of the lab.
Chemical industry restructuring began
in the early 1990s, and Mueller became disquieted by the decentralization that was occurring. "Various groups became like small companies and didn't look outside anymore," he says. Communication between scientists in different parts of large
organizations dried up. In 1993, Mueller moved to
Charlotte to head group engineering, which provided services across Hoechst Celanese's specialty chemicals unit. Restructuring was accelerating,
and career-minded executives saw research as an easy target for cost cutting. "If you fire someone in research, you don't see the impact for four to five years," Mueller points out. He tried to improve scientific communication by starting a technology council that brought R&D heads together.
In 1997, the breakup of Hoechst began and its specialty chemicals unit merged with Clariant. "I had meeting after meeting
where I had to explain what group engineering does," Mueller recalls. "But Clariant didn't get it, and I got tired of trying to explain." He nowwonders if Clariant would have botched the construction of a bleach activator plant (C&EN, June 23, page 14) if it hadn't disbanded group engineering.
Mueller set out on his own at the end of 1997. Soon after, he stumbled on the opportunity to buy a large quantity of a chemical that Clariant's Coventry plant no longer needed—and to resell it at a profit. This gave him a nest egg and the means to purchase lab equipment on the cheap from a recently closed Hoechst Celanese research center in Summit, N.J.
With his son Alex— a Ph.D. chemist from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—Mueller dismantled hoods and benches, gathered up flasks and beakers, and moved it all in a U-Haul truck to a 1,200-sq-ft space he rented in Charlotte.
He still had money left over, so his first project was a favorite from the past: a new route to cyclohexanedione—or CHD, hence the name of his company—a herbicide intermediate that was being made from resorcinol. For his second project, he developed a new route to a drug intermediate. And for his third, he undertook a customer request for a model compound with different hydroxyl groups; in the process, he came across a new synthesis of hydroxyty-rosol, the potent antioxidant in olive oil.
Mueller's next undertaking gave him a small amount of fame: In 2001, he developed a two-step synthesis of 4-(4-hydroxy-phenyl) butanoic acid, an intermediate for an Eh" Lilly drug. For this effort, he won $25,000 and became the first solver of a wet chemistry problem on InnoCentive, the scientific problem-solving website launched by Lilly in 2001.
Several more projects have come and gone since then for clients large and small. Not every one went as planned—Mueller is still looking to license his route to CHD, for example—but he says the business is a financial success.
Mueller just finished applying for a Department of Agriculture small business innovation grant to research the extraction of environmentally safe wood preservatives from red cedar residue. The project will bridge passions for chemistry and woodworking: Mueller builds furniture that his wife, an artist, has designed.
Mueller has been making connections his whole career, so it's no surprise that he also sees them in these two pursuits. "Chemistry is molecular carpentry" he says. "Carpenters make dovetails, chemists make triple bonds."-MICHAEL MCCOY
"Chemistry is molecular carpentry."
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WERNER MUELLER Chemist draws on a career in industry now that he's on his own in the lab
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