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From the company's viewpoint, the trick is not so much to invent something as to find practical uses for it. When Du Pont developed its new plastic, Surlyn, one customer cracked: "You've got the world's greatest answer. Now start looking for questions." Whenever one of its scientists does find a genie in a bottle, the company is quick to commit everything to exploit it: more scientists, plants, funds-and, importantly, more time and patience-than any other company...
Like the Daily Double. These elements have been enough to bring Du Pont many a windfall. They came together, for example, in a narrow darkroom in the industrial area of Parlin, N.J., where Physicist R. Kingsley Blake produced Du Pont's new no-negative photographic film. Blake started out by simply trying to untangle a peculiar phenomenon that he had been observing for a few months: faint positive images that unaccountably appeared on sheets of film. He was sure that the reaction was caused by any one of countless chemicals in his photo lab-but which one? Working...
...film is not yet as fast as conventional film, and Du Pont will sell it initially to industry for use in making mats and plates for printing, and for reproducing engineering drawings. But the company does not rule out the creation of a huge market among amateur photographers. Says Research Chemist Dean R. White: "If we can lick the speed problem, we will be able to treat a paper base with this emulsion and produce a direct print on paper. Then we would be competitive with Polaroid...
Testing Prisoners. Like other explorers, Du Pont's chemists often discover not what they had set out to find but something far more intriguing. One notable case is the company's new anti-virus drug, Symmetrel, which derives from a compound of organic chemicals that has a uniquely diamond-shaped molecular structure and is called adamantane. First formulated by a pair of Yugoslav scientists in 1941, adaman-tane had long been a laboratory curiosity around the world-because of its unusual structure-when Du Pont asked its men to search out uses...
Looking for a veterinary medicine that might work against viruses in animals, Du Pont scientists in the late 1950s tested some 20,000 compounds. One of the compounds based on the adamantane molecule showed promise, not only for animals but also for humans. In 1959 two Du Pont chemists rejiggered the molecular structure of adamantane a bit and developed a new compound, known as EXP-105-1. Scientists then began running tests on 6,000 mice a week, spraying their noses to fill their lungs with fatal doses of viruses. The compound raised the mice's resistance...