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Testing Prisoners. Like other explorers, Du Pont's chemists often discover not what they had set out to find but something far more intriguing. One notable case is the company's new anti-virus drug, Symmetrel, which derives from a compound of organic chemicals that has a uniquely diamond-shaped molecular structure and is called adamantane. First formulated by a pair of Yugoslav scientists in 1941, adaman-tane had long been a laboratory curiosity around the world—because of its unusual structure—when Du Pont asked its men to search out uses for it.
Looking for a veterinary medicine that might work against viruses in animals, Du Pont scientists in the late 1950s tested some 20,000 compounds. One of the compounds based on the adamantane molecule showed promise, not only for animals but also for humans. In 1959 two Du Pont chemists rejiggered the molecular structure of adamantane a bit and developed a new compound, known as EXP-105-1. Scientists then began running tests on 6,000 mice a week, spraying their noses to fill their lungs with fatal doses of viruses. The compound raised the mice's resistance.
In 1962 the scientists got permission from the Food and Drug Administration to test the drug on humans, found after tests on volunteers (including 850 inmates at a prison in Holmesburg, Pa.) that those who took pills made of the compound were much less likely than others to succumb to Asian flu. Conclusion: the drug does not kill the virus but inhibits its multiplication by preventing it from entering the cells of the body. Since scientists until recently considered an anti-virus drug a medical impossibility, the new Du Pont drug has revolutionary possibilities and may lead Du Pont into an area it has never before tried. Copeland, for one, has special reason to be pleased: 20 years ago he proposed in writing that Du Pont turn its enormous research potential to the drug business. "The pharmaceutical companies have been queuing up at our door seeking rights to manufacture or sell Symmetrel," says he, "but we're going to market it ourselves."
Shoes for Orphans. Copeland has even higher hopes for Corfam. The product of 30 years of research and $30 million, it is different from any previous synthetic—the first leather substitute that is truly waterproof, shape-retaining, scuff-resistant, porous and long-lasting. Since leather is a remarkably complex material much like human skin, creating the substitute has taken longer and cost more than Du Pont expected when it set out on its search. Corfam is a complicated combination of several synthetics with seemingly opposite properties: tight on the outside, loose on the inside and porous throughout.
The scientists at Du Pont's Experimental Station first found a way to duplicate leather's "breathability" by impregnating plastic material with threadlike fibers—and then dissolving the fibers. Then, as is its habit, Du Pont generated an internal competition by pitting two of its departments against each other in a battle that raged for two years amid warlike secrecy. In 1955 the fabrics and finishes department devised a mixture of tough polyurethane and resilient polyester fibers that most suitably duplicated leather's qualities. Du Pont's top-strategy Executive Committee gave the go-ahead for what was to be named Corfam.