An invention is not always finished at the moment when the technology is patented, or when it the product first goes on the market. There are always issues you can resolve or things you can tinker with and improve. Bob Franza, CSHL scientist and co-founder of Protein Databases, Inc.. describes how he worked to address a limitation of PDI’s technology: the fact that it required “substantial amounts of hot stuff,” i.e. radioactive materials.
Bob Franza, interviewed via Zoom on June 23, 2023
Interviewer: Antoinette Sutto
Bob: It was obvious to me that one of the major limitations of what we were doing was the need to use a radioisotope to incorporate that into cells while the proteins were being made.
Interviewer: Why was that a limitation?
Bob: Well, it was radioactive material.
Interviewer: Oh, okay. I wondered if there was something else–
Bob: Yes, it was kind of non-trivial when you’re dealing with– we were using substantial amounts of hot stuff. Everything was contaminated.
Interviewer: I talked to some of the waste disposal, the facilities people here [at CSHL], about what we do with our radioactive tracers and how they– and they described to me how there’s companies that come, they collect it, it’s taken elsewhere in the country. It goes to Maryland, it goes to Jersey, it goes to wherever. How did you guys deal with that? Bob: Oh, we had a full control around the material and the waste was properly disposed of. All of them and very– let’s face it, we could injure ourselves. We were all pretty darn cautious about it, but still, I knew it was going to be a limitation. I actually have two patents that show how much I thought it was limitation, which had to do with using a non-radioactive isotope to do the same type of treatment, but if you did that and you splattered it out in a gel and put it up against a piece of film, you’d have a blank– you wouldn’t see anything, but with the mass spectrometer, that changes entirely. The notion was to use mass spectrometry as the analytic tool. I got it to the point where the patents were issued.”