BYU scientist creates chemical detector

AMERICAN FORK — When U.S. Army special forces infiltrate a factory, they need to know quickly whether they've found chemical weapons so they can call in an airstrike.

Similar speedy information is important to soldiers who believe they have been exposed to a chemical attack or to police and firefighters who respond to a terrorist attack or a spill that could include hazardous materials.

Completely reliable information about chemicals in an attack or a spill has not been available without taking samples to a laboratory, but now Brigham Young University scientist Milt Lee and the American Fork company he co-founded have created a miniaturized, lightweight device that recalls the fictional Tricorder of the TV and movie franchise "Star Trek."

"This is a historic occasion for Brigham Young University," said Mike Alder, head of the university's technology transfer office. "(On Wednesday), we signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Torion Technologies, which has licensed 10 patents from BYU. Because we did, the world is a safer place."

The Guardion-7 chemical detector is a 28-pound portable device that can detect, without false positives and with exact specificity, a wide range of chemicals in fewer than five minutes, even in harsh environments like the Iraqi desert.

The U.S. Department of Defense, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and other Army-related industries have provided $5 million in grants for the development of the Guardion-7, Torion president Douglas Later said.

Later once was one of Lee's lab assistants at BYU and has teamed with him to start companies before. A team of 20 consultants on the project includes other BYU professors and students.

Lee set out with his brother Edgar after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to create a chemical detector that would be so simple that a soldier or firefighter could use it with minimal training while wearing the maximum hazardous-material protection gear.

The briefcase-sized Guardion-7, which costs $55,000, has a red on-off switch and three black buttons for easy use. Edgar Lee used a large syringe-like device during a press conference Thursday to take a sample from a jumbo Wintergreen-flavored Lifesaver.

The syringe, constructed to be easy to handle while wearing unwieldy protective gloves, injected a polymer wire into the Lifesaver package. Lee then plunged the syringe into a heated injection port in the machine. The chemical sample was vaporized out of the polymer film and directed through a capillary tube to a miniaturized gas chromatograph, where it was separated.