Conversations from the Hall of Fame

Edward B. Bagley, interviewed 2003

(Time: ~6:45 minutes)

I was born in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada which is somewhat north of the Montana border and when I was about 10, we moved to Ontario where I went to high school and subsequently university and after that I went down to Cornell University and did graduate work and then came back and lived in Quebec for some years. 

Why Science? 

I think I was always interested in knowing how nature worked. There are many questions that came to mind as I was growing up and science seemed the best way to answer some of these. 

Early Career

My first work was with Canadian Industries Limited in Montreal. CIL was actually jointly owned  by Dupont in the United States and Imperial Chemical Industries in England. 

So I had a chance to work for an international company. I worked there for some years and enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed working in industry. 

Coming to ARS

I came from CIL. I went down to Washington University where I was a professor of chemical engineering. I was a tenured professor there but there was some issues came up in ARS, sounded like very interesting work and so I decided to move to ARS and it worked out very well from my point of view anyway. So all of it was in Peoria, occasionally we can into Washington but then they threw me out again from time to time.

Aflatoxin

I think what really impressed me most was work we undertook with aflatoxin. Aflatoxin is a carcinogen agent that's produced by Aspergillus flavus, mold and in corn the aflatoxin can be a very, very bad actor indeed. Bill Tollen who was director of the center at the time figured we'd try using the method, that I believe was developed first at the southern lab, for detoxifying corn. And I was put in charge of the program and we succeeded thanks to my coworkers who, it was a 24 hour a day work for about a month to get the work done. When I was finished we had a process that could decontaminate corn and what really made me very pleased with the success was a call I got from an elevator operator down in the south who had just ... he had something like a hundred thousand bushels of corn which he told me was worth nothing because it was contaminated with aflatoxin. And our process at least allowed it to be retrieved for animal feed. So it was not a total loss. We were able to recover the corn.

Super Slurper

I never was officially on the project. I was talking with my colleagues Bill Doane and Charlie Russell and they had a few questions which I thought I might look into and I looked into them and it was during this that some of the water absorbing characteristics of the polymer became evident and I think both Charlie Russell, who was the lab chief at the time, and Bill Doane, who was the research leader at the time, responded immediately when they saw the results of this work and from there on it was accelerated.

Serendipity

They had a program on doing what are called graft copolymerization on starch. That's trying to change the properties of starch by adding a synthetic polymer onto the starch chain. The objective was not initially to discover Super Sluper--nobody thought of it. But it was one of the fallouts, one of the unexpected fallouts of the work. Very common, that happens more often than people will admit.

Words of Wisdom 

What I would say first of all is believe your own data. I did some work years ago which turned out to be fairly useful in various ways and I remember talking to another scientist at a meeting that I went to and he told me that he too had discovered the same effect that I had, but he hadn't believed it and he never published it and so if you are getting results that are unexpected this is always very nice if you've done the work right. But you have to believe what you've got and let people know about it. 

I have another example of that, in fact one of the things about super sluper it's a very effective thickening agent. When you add it to water you can make the water highly viscose. We found out why it is so effective in making water highly viscous and once again I talked about this at a meeting at a garden research conference and after my presentation, another scientist from industry came to me and he said you know your explanation is right, he said we found that too but we couldn't publish it and this of course is one of the nice things in ARS that you can in fact publish the data that you've discovered and anyone can then use. It's contribution to the net knowledge.

Future of the Work

One thing I'd like to see is Super Sluper I think has tremendous possibilities in agriculture particularly in arid and semi-arid regions. I'd like to see the Department putting more effort into how to apply these materials for water conservation and for agricultural use in general. So I'd like very much to see more work done along those lines the economics and the methods of applying the material.

Today

Among other things I still do a lot of referring for technical journals so I get sent articles to give an opinion on and I like doing that because of course it keeps me up-to-date, it means I have to keep in touch with the literature and I've also done consulting. I have done a fair amount of consulting work which I enjoy.