George Rathmann Interview (page: 6 / 9) Founding Chairman, Amgen	Print Interview

Can you tell us how Scotchgard came to be?

George Rathmann: Well, that was pure chance. We were doing basic research, making samples of polymers, which were all fluorochemicals, and my technician spilled some on her shoe. It was a tennis shoe...

Can you explain for our lay audience what a fluorochemical is?

George Rathmann: It's a class of molecules that are so distinct that they behave almost totally different from the kinds of things we see.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you take gasoline, for example, and produce the counterpart that substitutes a fluorine atom for a hydrogen atom -- and a fluorine atom is just a different part of the periodic table -- but if you substitute those fluorine atoms, you totally change the properties of the molecule. And you make it so that it practically has no surface tension, which means, in contrast to the way water behaves where it kind of curls up at the edges, this liquid just spills and just goes everywhere at one time. It's got very low surface tension. The property of Scotchgard, of course, was that nothing can wet the surface. The surface is very low surface tension. What it requires to wet something, you have to have a -- well, it's complicated. But the fact is, that a Scotchgard surface behaves like wax. Wax is a step toward a fluorochemical. It has lower energy than other surfaces. So if you think about things that oil and water will stick to, you can get a whole array. And at the very extreme end, the one that's most resistant is a fluorochemical. We knew all that, except that we didn't know is how to put it on a fabric so that it would stay.

And when my technician said, "It's staying on my shoe day after day after day..."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. She spilled the material on her shoe from one of our experiments, and she was -- it was her invention. It really wasn't mine. She was smart enough to realize after about two weeks that that thing hadn't gone away. And then when she put water on it, it beaded up just like you would predict for a fluorochemical. It was totally oil and water resistant, and it was permanent. And that was the amazing thing. So that this way of applying a fluorochemical as an elastic material -- or a high molecular weight material, however you want to define it, a totally different type of structure -- was exactly the right way to do it. So what happened is I coated up some fabric that was around there that had been used for tests, hoping to find a textile treatment, and I coated it up and I did it. By good fortune, I did it under various conditions, different concentrations and different sources of the polymer. I sent those in for evaluation. I knew they looked good to me, but I was not in a position to say the are better than anything else we'd ever seen. But when I put them in for evaluation, it took a while for them to be looked at, because everybody kind of assumed there wasn't much there, that we hadn't done anything really remarkable, just coated these fabrics up. But finally, when a new person was hired, and he had the job of making sure we did a careful evaluation of all the new ideas, and when this idea was evaluated, he said, "This is the most spectacular material we've ever seen." That was the beginning of Scotchgard.

Unfortunately, very recently (2000), Scotchgard was discontinued. I'm still grieving over that, because you fall in love with something like that, and for a long time you feel very good about all the things that it's done. I think, frankly, it will be rejuvenated some day, but right now it's been discontinued.

Did you have part of the patent on that because you helped create it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. George Rathmann: There was no patent that was in my name. The work was all done under my supervision, and that was a way of identification. It's been my feeling all along that when work is done by the person, the person that puts the thing on the fabric, or the person that makes the observation, the person that carries out the experiment and makes it work, is the one that should always -- I don't believe in the fact that the supervisor should be on every paper. Now in the academic world, you have to do this, because the professor has to build his reputation so he can have the prestige that the university wants for some of their key people. But I like the system much better where you don't put your -- I was on a few patents, and I fought that every time. I thought that that was almost always inappropriate. There was always somebody I thought did a more vital part of the work.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

It was a 3M patent, wasn't it?

George Rathmann: Yes. Oh, yes. Yes.

And did the lab technician who spilled it on her shoe get on the patent?

George Rathmann: No. It turned out that she didn't get on the patent either which is always a little bit of a grief. It was the people that refined the choice of the molecule. We knew it worked, but you had to find out how to make exactly the right molecule. Those people got on the patent which was fine. It's the people that really did the hard work. They had to put the energy in to get from a primitive result to a commercial result.

One thing we often hear scientists say is that making mistakes is very much part of the job. If you're not experimenting and failing, then you're not in a position to have a triumph in the lab. But when you combine business and science, aren't you looking at a financial risk that pure scientists don't have to deal with?

George Rathmann: It's almost like you have this thing switching back and forth. If you don't allow people to fail, you really turn off the spigot of creation, because they're not going to be taking chances. But there's another extreme that can be very costly and totally ineffective. That is science for its own sake, and it's hard to see how you get the right balance. I think it's just people.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Sometimes there's the cynic in the lab that actually does a lot of good, and he says, "Well, you know, it would be nice to believe everything you say, but I'm going to limit my conclusions to the ones that are really proven. So I don't think you've proved this yet, I don't think you've proved that yet." You keep yourself from being carried away with enthusiasm, which you need, but unsound enthusiasm which you can't afford. So I think the give and take between scientists -- even when individuals make the key contributions -- the teamwork associated with challenging their ideas and making sure that you don't get trapped into something that's very comfortable, that you continue to look at, because you tell yourself it's working well, when it really isn't. So there's a balance there. There is a huge mistake that can be made on those strictly academic -- allow people to go on forever into a field and never have to be tested with whether it's commercially interesting. Or the other, that if you can't tell me what the reason to do this is and you can't guarantee me success, I won't let you start the program. Well, that's where you fail. But the 3M system is proof of how to do it. I mean, that's what I could take with me to both Abbott Labs and Amgen: the idea that you allow people to feel that they're taking on programs that they might fail at, but if they fail, they're going to be learning something, and they can go on from there.

That's the way I think you have to run your businesses. That dimension of some prudence is obviously needed. The way you achieve that, I think, is with the structure of the organization. I don't think you do it from the top down. You let the organization itself have mechanisms by which it monitors its own performance, and challenges itself to the best possible programs that can be found.

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