Attached in the following is a link to a video produced by the American Chemical Society and posted publicly in U-Tube, highlighting the 2022 Heroes of Chemistry Award to Steve Chum and his team’s invention of two breakthrough enhanced PE product families. The video also showed some details on how essential these products are to human lives. PE and plastics had long been regarded as “boring technologies”. It is very unusual for ACS to bestow its annual Heroes of Chemistry to old plastics products. In the recent years, most of the awards went to new drugs and new electronic components and technologies.
Steve started working on the concept of using computer molding and molecular architecture approach to tailor design new PE molecules to gain performance adventages in the early 90’s by working with several university professors (Prof. Paul Phillips of University of Tennessee, Prof. Anne Hiltner of Case Western Reserve University, etc) and his Dow team. In fact, he received the ACS Industrial/Academic Corporative Research Award jointly with Prof. Hiltner in 2001 for their corporative effort. Fortunately, metallocene catalyst became available at the same time that allowed them to make designed PE molecules effectively. The combination of computer technology, materials science and chemistry (metallocene catalyst) resulted in these families of breakthrough enhanced PE products that were just honored by ACS for it annual Heroes of Chemistry Award.
While a lot of young scientists are regarding plastics technologies are boring nowadays, this could be an inspiring story for them to rethink about their future endurance.
