‘Green Chemistry’ Wins Professor Bennett Rare Patent
If Dr. Jacqueline Bennett had left the lab, she would have missed the “gold glitter” reaction she’d been waiting for.
“I was writing and I looked up to see gold glitter falling out of the test tube,” said the SUNY Oneonta associate professor of chemistry. “I thought I was hallucinating.”
She quickly repeated the test, then again, then again. “I had to convince myself it was real,” she said.
That gold glitter was an imine, a chemical compound used in chemotherapy and cholesterol-lowering drugs, as well as rust inhibitors, to help plastics break down and in organic LED lighting. It’s not an uncommon synthesis in chemistry, except that Bennett’s method is the first process that’s completely green.
The chemist began looking for less-toxic ways to synthesize imines in 2002, when she and her husband, Rex Wolfe, were planning to start a family.
At that time, she was teaching at Drury University in Springfield, Mo,, and methylene chloride was the standard solvent used in chemical reactions. “It’s not something you want to be breathing in eight hours a week when you’re pregnant,” she said.
She began looking into green labs and lesson plans, but when she couldn’t find enough to teach a full year of chemistry classes, she began to design her own, substituting her benign compound for ethyl acetate – commonly found in nail polish remover – as the solvent. “That’s what got me into green chemistry,” she said.
Her latest project negates the toxicity of the solvent, reduces the energy needed for the process, and won her a patent, awarded July 1 by the U.S. Patent Office.
That makes her only the second SUNY Oneonta professor to receive a patent, after Joe Chiang, also a chemistry professor; both his patents have expired.
The SUNY Central Research Foundation, which helped her with the patent application, will now approach pharmaceutical companies in hopes that they will adopt her method.
And in the meantime, she’s begun a new synthesis, attempting to green up the synthesis of thiosemicarbazones to inhibit the tyrosinase enzyme, which is responsible not only for a great tan, but the browning of fruit and the coloring of Siamese cats like the one Bennett just adopted. “Everyone recognizes it,” she said. “Now they can learn about it.”