It’s Sticky
How a mistake in the lab transformed modern medicine
T
he enormity of his discovery clicked when a young lab technician accidentally glued together the two prisms of a $700 Abbe refractometer. Rather than firing the technician for his costly error, Dr. Harry Coover ’41, P’66 began to run around the lab, gluing everything together. The fates had given him a second chance, and he wasn’t going to let it get away from him this time. Coover and his team had rediscovered DR. HARRY COOVER ’41, P’66 IS cyanoacrylates, HONORED WITH THE HOBART MEDAL OF EXCELLENCE a class of chemicals with powerful adhesive properties and a tensile strength measuring at a ton per square inch. You probably know the product
by Melissa Sue Sorrells ’05
as SuperGlue or Krazy Glue, but until that fateful realization in the lab, it was really just a pain in Coover’s neck. He had initially developed the compound during World War II while trying to create an optically clear plastic gunsight. The substance worked as a mold for the sites, but it stuck to everything, frustrating Coover, who eventually put the formula aside. Six years later, as Coover and a team of young scientists struggled to develop a heat-resistant polymer for jet canopies, they revisited the work he’d done with gunsights. Instead of leading his team down the path to jet canopies, the sticky re-discovery refocused them on refining this new super glue for commercial use. It would be impressive enough if the story ended there – with Coover responsible for the repair of hundreds of vases broken by clumsy children the world over – but within just a few years, his adhesive had grown into something bigger than anyone could have imagined. Coover quickly realized that the adhesive, initially marketed as Kodak 910 because the glue set before you could count to 10, may have medical relevance. In 1964, Kodak applied to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to use cyanoacrylate glue as a wound sealant and hemostat.
Though their initial application was denied, the glue nonetheless eventually found use on battlefields in Vietnam. “I was first made aware of using cyanoacrylates to manage trauma while I was serving as a Battalion Surgeon in Vietnam,” says Dr. Vincent R. DiGregorio ’64, chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Winthrop University Hospital. Responding to this new need, Coover developed disposable cyanoacrylate sprays. “If somebody had an open wound that was bleeding, the biggest problem they had was to stop the bleeding so they could get the patient back to the hospital,” Coover said in an interview. “The medics used the spray, stopped the bleeding, and were able to get the wounded back to the base hospital.” Captain Chad A. Bevan III ’96, an Air Force flight surgeon currently serving in the Middle East, is happy to report that Coover’s discovery is still being used in combat situations, though not always as the label indicates. “I usually carry cyanoacrylate adhesives with me on combat missions, just in case,” he says. “Just a few weeks ago, I used the adhesive to repair an essential part of the pilot’s helmet just as we were entering Baghdad airspace. Thanks to Dr. Coover’s work, the mission continued successfully.”
How SuperGlue works In its liquid or gel form, SuperGlue is made up of monomers, very small molecules that are easily bonded to other small molecules. As soon as the monomers interact with hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the air (usually from water), they bond together into long chains of molecules (polymers) that are difficult to break.
10 Pulteney Street Survey | Winter 2010