Talking with Dr. Rolf Albach: University-Industry Collaboration, SSbD Framework, Future of Science

Q: You have been working in the chemical industry for decades. Please tell us about your background, your professional experience.

Dr. Rolf Albach : Well, there’s an old saying that diamonds are girl's best friends, and gemstones were my best friends when I was 16 or 17. I was collecting crystals and gemstones, and one day my father told me, "Look, mineralogy is a nice field, but chemistry is much broader, and at your age, perhaps you don't know what you're going to do in the future, so take a broader field and decide later what you will focus on." 

So I went into chemistry, and, yes, it was a good decision. What I wanted to do specifically was very clear after my two internships at Bayer and Hurst in America and Japan. I wanted to work with customers, so I decided to choose industry, not academia.

I moved to Munich mostly because of the mountains, and I'm originally from the Rhineland, where I'm living right now. Munich is attractive both for skiing and for academia because the Technical University there is one of the best in Germany. I got a pretty good education, and a pretty good time. I took two things from there: one is my PhD degree, and the other one is my wife. 

I spent a year in France doing research, and I then joined Bayer. As I wanted to work with customers, the only way to do that was to focus on polymers. So I took the first opportunity that I had in polymers, and that was what they call polyurethanes. I was responsible for polyurethane materials for nearly 10 years. 

Now, I'm back in research, and I’m working on the fire resistance of plastics, on new car smell, and focus more on the chemical recycling of polymers.

I also became head of an industry association, called the Association for Chemistry and Economics which is part of the Association of German Chemists, where I'm also part of the board. Now, I'm able to take a broader point of view: not only for the polymer world that I've been working on, but also about the general trends in the industry, about the evolution of the heavy chemical industries, but also about life science industries. 

I can put my nose into more things than before, and that's something I really appreciate. We have an opportunity to talk to a lot of different people, and curiosity is driving us. I love my association work. It's all about curiosity, about people helping to run projects, and getting them into networks.

Q: You work with universities a lot. How do you choose which of them to work with? Do you have any set of criteria?

Dr. Albach: There are two things. First of all, the industry is usually not interested in realizing the ideas of academia. We are very strong in continuous optimization of what we do, and we have the power to implement changes in existing production, existing technology. 

We have much less disruptive initiatives. For that, people should launch a startup, and then after a while industry will have a look and invest in these startups if they are viable.

There’s a famous Harvard Business Review article on why big companies can’t innovate. This article is pretty true. We are engaged in doing things we do as well as we can; at least better than everybody else. 

What we are looking for in industry is people that help us solve our problems. So we look at what academics publish. We’re not looking into the chemistry itself, we’re looking at the technology they use. All academic professors, teachers, or professionals from research institutes, have technologies that they can do very well, and we look at those. Is there a link between what is interesting to us and the technologies that these people can do? If there is, we connect with them, but most of the time we just want to talk, not start a project straight away.

You may recall a famous book Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. In this famous story the Prince meets a fox, and the fox tells him, "Look, we have to get acquainted with each other." And this is why the Prince comes there every day at a certain time, and after a certain time, they expect that they’ll get somewhere. 

This is what the future of academic experience is: you have to get acquainted with different people. This is why I talk about this association that supports the Institute of Polymer Research. This is why other institutes have advisory boards with people from industry. This is just to get accustomed, just to learn about the problems and the interests of the other side. And if you one day find a common interest, fine, you do a project. 

Projects in industry change. Professors in academia change and their interests do too. But you really need to be continuously exchanging information. You can’t do it with a “hop on hop off” approach like the famous city tours. Ford said, "You stay, you meet each other, you stay in touch with each other, and eventually you work together." And this is the way it works. It’s about trust. 

It also often happens the other way around in public calls. Academia starts with the idea of what could be a research project, and they find an industry partner, and the industry partner then collects industry consultants: their customers, their suppliers, and other partners. You put together a consortium. It can also be a pretty good way to get acquainted, to get to know each other. And then three years later, you make a bilateral project. The reason these consortiums exist is not only to work together but also to get to know each other.

Q: Which party is the one most interested in collaboration: academia or the industry?

Dr. Albach: Academia doesn't need the industry for collaboration. Academia needs the industry as a future workplace for their PhD students because PhD students, at least in the number that we generally have, cannot all stay in academia. So, the first thing we're talking about is an exchange of highly educated, well-skilled scientists. 

The difference between a masters and a PhD student is that a masters student will work for a long time on ideas of other people, but for a PhD, it is expected that they initiate projects themselves after a year or a year and a half, depending on how much time they need to learn the new chemistry. But the main difference between a PhD and a masters student is the independence of running a project, starting a project.

I see more and more PhD students running collaborations themselves. It's important for industry that you initiate such projects, that you work with people from other countries. 

So, first of all, collaboration between industry and academia is about people. We transfer know-how, we transfer science though people. Students get their degrees, and they get hired by industry or other institutes.

The second point is that we also learn from academic papers, from academic lectures, and the other way around. I teach at the university, I talk about what is interesting to us in industry, how we work. 

What industry should do more is to publish in journals that academic researchers read. They don't read patents. Although in patents, there's a lot of knowledge in the first part, there's a very precise experimental part at the end, and in between, there's a very boring part. This is why I teach my students to read patents: just read the first two pages or the second and the third, and then read the experimental part.

Essentially, we must explain more about what we do and the chemistry we are interested in. On the other hand, the new open access means that you have to pay for publishing. There are some exceptions, but this is a lot of work, and the return on investment is doubtful. 

So, we don't tell academic researchers what we are working on. This is why I try to do it differently. And there's no one to transfer scientific knowledge from patents to journals people from academia read. On top of that, not all patents are translated, so you have to go through automatic translation which is also not always a pleasure. 

On the other hand, it's a lot of work for us to understand academic research and scale it up. This is, I believe, is much easier for life science, but in material science, in heavy chemical industries, it’s difficult. 

Q: Let’s talk about “safe and sustainable by design” (SSbD) framework. In one of the posts you mention “an increasing gap between young scientists … that are intrigued the EU commissions’ safe-and-sustainable-by-design recommendation and industry laboratory chemists, that might get limited in the options to solve a problem and face an increasing request for data & documentation.” Could you elaborate on that part?

Dr. Albach: First of all, for young people, having a safe environment is just mostly in line with what they expect. They're talking about sustainability and they're talking about chemistry, and it’s not confrontational (80% of the people have the impression that chemistry is a necessary evil). They want to be appreciated for the things they do, and I can very much support that, and it's reasonable from an intellectual point of view.

What the European Commission does can be compared to how it works in biathlon. In a biathlon, if you take your time and hit all five targets, you don’t have to go the extra round of 150 meters. That’s the philosophy of “safe and sustainable by design”, and that’s reasonable. Every beginner in biathlon would think the same way. 

So you, as a researcher, have to fill out more forms to make sure that the requirements of this recommendation have been fulfilled. Because then, there will be an auditor coming to your laboratory, starting with the ISO 9000, but it could also be an auditor from a financial institution that checks your sustainability reporting. Or for a small company, it could even be a bank that asks you, "Are you following safe and sustainability recommendations?" And then you have to present the files where you say, "Yes, I checked everything before I started my laboratory work." 

In the end, it’s about the work-life balance of people in laboratories because documentation for all these kinds of requirements takes time. Also, because of some of these requirements, especially the financial ones, this documentation process is hardly delegable. Most people would put that responsibility on the C-level management. Now, it’s about the work-life balance of the C-level executives and it’s about the work-life balance in the laboratory. 

How much documentation do you have? Even if you look into the safety data sheet every time you want to do something in the lab, do we have to document that you have looked into it? And do you have to document that you’ve thought about the processes of your customer? Traders usually don’t need to know what their customers do. In the end, if you sell your products to traders, you might not even know what happens with them afterwards. So there will be a discussion about data.

The reality is that people want to go home in the evening so they don’t prepare the documentation. There must be a way to find a reasonable approach. On the other hand, it’s unreasonable that people cannot just add two hours on top of their normal work. Or, if they can, well, it’s a question whether they should. If the C-level person in an SME spends two or three hours on SSbD documentation for the next audit, they don’t spend it on the next investment project. And we have an investment problem in Europe. Even the small companies are under-invested, at least many of them. It’s just a matter of where you spend your time and why you are expected to spend your time on certain activities.

So, for one hour requested, you add two hours from internal requirements to make sure that nothing happens that could be an irritation for an auditor. I think this is the main reason why we have a gap between reality and the expected implementation of the proposed SSbD framework. There needs to be a way of finding a balance between these two extremes.

The recommendation of the Association for Chemistry and Economics would be that first of all, we should respect the work-life balance of the people that will work with SSbD. We better start with public interest entities like big companies and big research institutions that already have the staff and that run their processes a bit differently than smaller organizations, so they just have to adapt their processes. 

Second is that we use SSbD with peer review, which is the normal academic way of challenging projects and ideas. 

And we adopt the “safe sustainable by design” framework only at technical readiness level 5 or so. Because there are many projects in laboratories, and the decisions about who is going to produce the product, whether you have a top producer, or you invest in manufacturing yourself, or you find a partner in India, or a partner in Italy are not made very early in the process. 

If you ask people to explain how they do it, over time, you will learn how big companies work with such a process. BASF is going to do it differently than Sanofi or Eni in Italy. Eventually, there will be a lot of learnings because every company will have to explain how they do it. Given the constraints of competition laws and making sure they don’t discuss prices, they will sit together and align their processes over time.

Trying to align with established processes, like peer review in academia or standardization processes in industry, that people are familiar with would help in the implementation of new processes, like the SSbD. 

Q: I’d like to talk about the future of science in general. How do you see it? What would be the biggest trends in chemistry?

Dr. Albach: First of all, academic chemistry is changing completely. What we see is a merger of biology and chemistry. I had a discussion with a young chemist from Tübingen who is merging inorganic chemistry with environmental science and biology. In the old times, it was organic chemistry that was linked somehow to biology through biochemistry, but now we’re talking about even the inorganic part.

People working in these merging fields of science have issues in their careers because the chairs of academia are still designed according to the current  structures. First you have to get a chair and then you can move within other fields. So we have to work with this merger of sciences. 

The Association for Chemistry and Economics is working on the border of economics, so economic sciences and chemistry, or that's at least our intention. Economics is a science. My grandfather made a then famous speech in 1952, defining business economics as a science. Now, we are working on the border between economics and chemistry, just like when biology and chemistry meet at biochemistry or synthetic biology. So, you can see it from both sides. And that’s interesting, and I love that because that's where creativity comes in.

People with different viewpoints meet, they speak different languages, they have to learn the language of one another, and then they can do amazing things. They think, “Oh, I’ve never thought about that.” That’s one thing that I love about this new type of chemistry.

Another important point is the meeting of IT, tech, and chemistry, so it’s all about data. In the company that I work for, we hired around two dozen computer scientists-chemists, it was before the COVID crisis. Computers are emerging, so we have to teach young people that chemistry is also a lot about computer chemistry. We are used to talking about "in vitro" (in glassware) experiments, but now we’re also talking about "in silico" (on silicon chips), and simulation is what’s happening in chemistry right now.

From an industrial point of view, most interesting for chemists is finding a way to make money out of data. We know how to make money out of a ton of chemicals, but how do we make money out of data? The economics of data is one of the most interesting topics in business chemistry. To be honest, I don’t have the solution. That solution has to be found by the next generation, and I’m pretty sure they will find it.

That’s about the small scale, the business economics perspective. The global perspective is that we have to find a living for 10 billion people in the world, and that won’t work without science. It doesn’t matter what kind of science, it’s all merging anyway, whether you’re a physicist, engineer, biologist, or chemist. They all have to work together with people from informatics or mathematics to solve these problems.

Here, I see separating molecules as one of the biggest problems. I’ll give three examples. 

The first is water. We have a huge amount of water in the sea, and it contains about 3.5% salt. You can’t drink it. There’s a lot of chemistry involved in desalination, and we spend a lot of energy, fossil energy, on desalination. We will increasingly use this method of getting clear water because people need it, plants need it, and in the end, we want to eat these plants and perhaps even use these plants in chemistry. There’s a lot of interesting chemistry based on renewable sources, so we need that water.

We have to find a way to desalinate the salt in the sea and remove contaminants from sewage water. That’s one challenge, and it involves physics, chemistry, and biology in water treatment.

Second, we need to clean up the world. We have to find an economic incentive to collect all the plastic waste, and all the other waste like minerals, glass, etc., and recycle it. We need to create value from post-consumer materials. This requires engineering, chemistry, and possibly enzymatic processes from biology. Cleaning up a few kilograms of waste in a natural reserve involves a lot of work, because you’re dealing with tiny particles. Again, we need to find a way to extract small quantities from large volumes.

Third, we have about 400 ppm concentration of CO2 in the air which is a very small amount, and we want to extract it from there. A lot of chemistry is being done on that. We will probably need to build photovoltaic plants to run absorption plants, and photovoltaics are made from silicon, which is chemistry. So, we will need better photovoltaics to power the plants that remove small amounts of CO2 from large volumes of air.

Chemistry is still working on the same old things, but now with the support of computer science. Otherwise, we couldn’t do it. The newcomers will have a lot of work, but they’ll also have to work with economists because, in the end, you need a business model to get a return on your investment.

People doing this science need to pay the rent, send their kids to school, buy mobile phones, and maybe travel the world. And it’s good that they travel because I like it more than the old days when we couldn’t visit places like Vietnam. Discovering the world helps you become more tolerant, and you see how other people live.

In order to make this all happen, we need a combination of chemistry and economics, or rather, science and economics. I won’t exclude biology or physics, because they’re merging anyway.

Q: Please tell us about your plans for the future.

Dr. Albach: Well, career is not driving me anymore. I inherited from my father a couple of apple trees and plum trees that my grandfather had planted. Apple trees have a certain lifetime, it’s not like oak trees that grow for many hundreds of years. I have to replant them if I want my grandchildren to continue the family tradition.

So, my prime interest right now is to pass things on. This includes planting trees and planting ideas into the chemists that should take over the laboratories left and right, down the aisle where I have my office. It’s also about planting ideas into the people that run the Association for Chemistry and Economics. It’s not only about the next generation of Albach, which is important, but also about the next generation of chemists.

I still have the idea of educating young people about municipal economics and municipal politics. At least for the next five years, I will continue doing that. It’s about educating my students as well so that I can prepare them for what they will be facing in the future. 

One very specific project that I’m still working on is mentoring, which I believe is necessary. In my first term on the board of the Association of German Chemists, I didn’t succeed in modernizing the structure and expanding opportunities, but this journey isn’t over.

I believe we need more mentoring, and it needs to be low-key, in the way we’re talking. I think globalization means that we do need to teach people, although “teaching” might be the wrong word. We need to talk to people. Teaching implies a hierarchy between teacher and pupil, the old Japanese sensei role. I don’t think that’s the way forward, because I learn more from my mentee about the digital world than he may learn from me about the economic world of industry. So, we need to keep the exchange, and we need to foster that exchange.

One of the fun things I’ve done in the last five years was talking to the recycling industry. It’s something completely new, because we talk to physicists and biologists all the time, but we never talked to people from recycling. Talking to people who had never spoken to chemists before was the most exciting experience I’ve had in the last five to seven years. I hope this will continue for the next couple of decades, as long as I can keep doing it.