YSU professor working to make food supply safe

Faculty and graduate-level research spurs a local economy, the chemist said.
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Puffer fish have swim bladders so poisonous that chefs in Japan must be licensed to do serve them.
The discarded shells of castor beans used to make castor oil contain ricin, so toxic one foreign diplomat was killed by the amount carried on the point of an umbrella.
Terrorists know these poisons are out there.
Thankfully, so do American chemists such as Dr. Daryl Mincey.
Mincey, chairman of the chemistry department at Youngstown State University, starts a yearlong position next week as a research fellow with the federal Food and Drug Administration. He'll spend four days each week working on counterterrorism research with other scientists in the FDA-owned forensic chemistry lab in Cincinnati.
Their goal is to find an inexpensive and quick way to screen large amounts of food coming into the United States from other countries. Screening would help workers detect biological poisons and possibly avert a terrorist attack.
"The food supply in the United States, I think everybody realizes, is not well-protected. The real concern is that terrorists might use that as a way to get at us," Mincey said. "Our job is to try to stay ahead of them."
Mincey points out that it is not as easy to poison a large population as one might think. Targeting a water supply would not require a fizzy tablet, but large tanker trucks full of toxins.
How terrorists think
Still, he added, "Terrorists are like [computer] hackers. They sit around thinking about, 'How can I get away with something?'" For example, one terrorist group tried to put cyanide in the U.S. Embassy water by purchasing a nearby storefront and hiding inside as they dug to the water pipes, he said.
Mincey, an analytical chemist, will be working with a $250,000 instrument called a Q-Tof mass spectrometer, developed just a couple years ago.
He plans to work 10 to 12 hours a day, or more, four days each week beginning Sept. 8.
(Mincey will come home each Thursday night to see the YSU football games. A volunteer away-game photographer, he hasn't missed one game in about 150.)
He'll be working with Fred Fricke, his former lab mate from the University of Cincinnati graduate school, who now directs the FDA lab.
Fricke has been involved in domestic tampering concerns, including a case in which a Texas man placed cyanide in his wife's Tylenol, then put blame for it on the Chicago tampering case that had attracted national press attention, Mincey said.
In another case, the lab disproved a claim that a man's mouth was injured by a syringe in a cola can. Mincey said researchers purposely placed syringes in cans at the plant, tracking them to the store where the soda was purchased. Once there, they opened the cans and found an interior liner was significantly scratched; the liner of the can involved in the claim was not.
Lab's new focus
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the lab's focus has turned to global terrorism.
Mincey, a Cincinnati native, has been at YSU for roughly 25 years and holds a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati. He said he was introduced to the "wow" of chemistry by a neigh kbor whose mother was a chemistry professor.
He said YSU is allowing him a sabbatical from campus, paying him his partial salary, as he conducts research. As such, any discoveries would be patentable by YSU. Faculty members are eligible for sabbatical every seven years.
Mincey said graduate-level and faculty research pursuits are crucial to a successful university.
First, he said, it helps keep educators from getting stale.
"In education, you have to be at the forefront, at the horizon," he explained. "You can't stay there without going out and rehoning your skills once in a while."
Also, a university like YSU can create significant economic change by engaging in research that generates patents, discoveries and jobs, Mincey said. "Pure research," he explained, "is the only thing that tends to track with economic development."
In Akron, he said, the University of Akron helped re-energize the community through polymer research.
"Our problem in our area is that we don't have leaders, people to make new jobs," he explained. "Those people come out of research universities."
To illustrate the importance of research, he pointed out two researchers: Albert Einstein and Henry Ford.
Everything Einstein did, he said, was to make a better light bulb for his parents' light bulb factory. Learning took over, as did Einstein's discoveries.
Ford had first wanted to build his automobiles in Cincinnati, where workers were adept at building wagons, Mincey said. Instead, Ford settled in Detroit.
"Had Henry Ford gone to Cincinnati, where would Detroit be?" he asked. "It just took that individual, with that entrepreneurial spirit and that backing, to create Detroit.
"What we need to do now is find a Ford and bring him to Youngstown."
viviano@vindy.com