Boosting Bioscience
VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
Physics was still king of the sciences when I came back to OC and helped set up a center for international business at Chapman University. It was l988 and a tidal wave of advanced microchips, isotopes and lasers was flooding out of the labs and changing the world.
Today, it’s the biosciences that are the chief sources of new products. OC’s fastest growing businesses are those based on life sciences such as genetic foods, biopharmaceuticals and new medicines to prolong life and ease our aches and pains.
Against this background, it’s not surprising that an OC company now leads the way in harnessing micro-organisms,lets call them microbes,to clean up contaminated soil and prevent water pollution.
Meet Regenesis, a small, growing company headquartered in San Clemente, which in 10 years has become a leader in bioremediation.
Bioremediation? The science is complex but the essence is that naturally occurring microbes have the ability to degrade most types of pollution. The trick is to stimulate them to do so by providing the nutrients and, in most cases, the oxygen they need to flourish.
Enter a small group of talented individuals at Rogers Gardens in Newport Beach. Their leader was Gavin Herbert, then chairman of Irvine-based Allergan Inc., who was concerned that his plants weren’t growing well. The cause was over-watering, which deprived their roots of oxygen.
Once Gavin’s scientists got onto the job, they solved the problem by devising a blend of patented chemicals to release oxygen into the soil. And then, by a stroke of serendipity, an associate scientist realized the potential for this product to get rid of the pollutants in soil and groundwater.
The secret was to keep those microbes working over long periods of time. Hence Oxygen Release Compound, a crystalline magnesium mix that’s injected into the ground or dropped down bore holes into polluted soil and groundwater. Over weeks, months, even years, ORC feeds oxygen to the microbes and keeps them on the job until the site is cleaned.
ORC and other Regenesis products now are working their magic on more than 10,000 polluted properties in America, Europe and Japan. Their cleanup successes include the construction site of a major skyscraper in downtown San Francisco; a 19-acre former Chevron pipeline facility in the L.A. area; and halting the migration of a huge MTBE groundwater plume that threatened Southern California’s water supplies.
There are, of course, other ways of cleaning up polluted sites. The oldest is “dig & dump”,excavate the contaminated soil and haul it away for deposit in someone else’s backyard.
Then there’s “pump & treat”,pumping polluted groundwater to the surface and filtering out the contaminants,or air sparging, whereby pressurized air is injected into the polluted site and the gaseous emissions are burned off.
But the disadvantages of all these methods are obvious: You simply transfer the problem from one place to another.
Far better, wherever possible, is to clean up the mess on the spot using Regenesis compounds to accelerate nature’s own cleanup process. No need for heavy trucks. No need to get rid of large quantities of contaminated water, or emissions that can foul the air. The job gets done where the pollution is located. Underground.
ORC is not a cheap product. The raw materials have to be imported. Its comparative advantage is that it’s easy to use, either by direct injection with a geo-probe (a one-man drilling rig) or by applying it directly into existing wells. Labor costs therefore are low, and the overall cost of clean-up in most cases is significantly lower than other mechanical remedies.
Hence Regenesis’ boom in the l990s when the EPA demanded action to clean up the leaks from underground tanks at gas stations. The company cleaned up thousands of gas tanks in all parts of the country, releasing in the process the land values of large numbers of city center sites.
The next challenge was to tackle more complex wastes, for instance the toxic solvents emanating from dry cleaner stores. Using hydrogen instead of oxygen, the company developed a Hydrogen Release compound that uses microbes to degrade these poisonous wastes as if they were breathing them!
Ahead lie further products. Gavin Herbert, as a veteran of the pharmaceutical industry, is well aware that a company’s value lies as much in its pipeline of new products as it does in its current revenues. Regenesis is therefore working on new compounds to clean up aquifers polluted with metals such as the chromium that Julie Roberts highlighted in the movie “Erin Brockovich”; new microbes discovered by the company and its partners at Georgia Tech that are capable of dining out on vinyl chlorides, one of the most toxic sources of ground water contamination; and most exciting, a new method of detecting minute concentrations of the poison arsenic in water.
This latest biosensor, using microbial DNA, holds out the promise of cheaply protecting our water supplies from the threat of bioterrorism. It may also help prevent the devastating effects of naturally occurring arsenic on the water supplies of impoverished countries such as Bangladesh.
And that’s why I’ve become a biobooster. As the company takes its products overseas, notably to England where as under secretary of state in the world’s first Department of the Environment, I was appalled at the probable cost of cleaning up by old-fashioned methods the accumulated wastes of the first Industrial Revolution.
I’ve invested a few of my few dollars in Regenesis. Its success to date is proof that biology and botany are taking over from physics as the progenitors of cheaper, better ways of protecting the environment and enhancing our quality of life.
Viva Bioscience.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
