Developed ways to monitor radiation exposure, process nuclear wastes
Chemist E. Philip Horwitz of Naperville, Ill., will be honored on March 28 by the world's largest scientific society for developing methods to monitor radiation exposure, to separate and process nuclear waste, and other achievements in the field. He will receive the American Chemical Society Award in Separation Science and Technology at the Society's national meeting in San Francisco.
In his 38 years at Argonne National Laboratory, Horwitz developed ways to separate the components of radioactive waste for processing, using techniques such as solvent extraction and ion exchange. Then Congress passed a law in 1986 that allowed private citizens to obtain exclusive licenses for inventions developed at national laboratories, property previously in the public domain.
"I'd realized the need for better bioassay techniques and that I could apply these [processing] techniques to the problem. So I took advantage of this law in 1990 and co-founded Eichrom Industries," said Horwitz, now the company's senior consulting scientist.
The goal, he said, was to monitor workers' exposure and ingestion of radioisotopes better, faster and less expensively. Horwitz and his research team developed resins that selectively remove radioisotopes from complex mixtures -- in this case, urine and even fecal samples. The resin beads contain molecules custom-fit to capture each isotope.
"Prior to our technology, you needed to do to separate analysis for each element -- plutonium, uranium and so on," he said. "We get all of them at once."
Horwitz estimates that his resins process about 350,000 samples per year worldwide. They can also be used to assess soil, water and vegetation. Potential users include countries such as Norway and Finland, which monitor the after-effects of Chernobyl, and the defense industry, which tests for leaks from its plants.
Horwitz was going to be a carpenter until he took his first chemistry course in high school. "I heard about how there's gold in seawater, for example, and I got fascinated with the idea of separating it out," he remembered, then laughed. "That was over 54 years ago, and I haven't stopped loving chemistry."
The ACS Award in Separation Science and Technology is sponsored by IBC Advanced Technologies Inc. of American Fork, Utah, and Millipore Corp. of Bedford, Mass.
A nonprofit organization with a membership of 161,000 chemists and chemical engineers, the American Chemical Society www.acs.org publishes scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences, and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.