Join us for a conversation with one of our own. We talk with Simon Pierce, who’s had a storied career in the chemicals market over the past 40 year. Simon has a compelling personal story and has seen it all. What’s more, he shares it all in an entertaining way that will have you wanting to share a pint him.
Visit https://www.thermofisher.com/chemistry-podcast/ to access the extended video version of this episode and the episode summary sheet, which contains links to recent publications and additional content recommendations for our guest. You can also access the extended video version of this episode via our YouTube channel to hear, and see, more of the conversation!
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We embrace this rare opportunity to sit and chat freely with someone who has lived and breathed the technical and business sides of the chemicals market for the last 40 years. Simon Pearce is a Senior Product Manager in Thermo Fisher Scientific and a man of a thousand stories.
Join us for this entertaining and eye-opening journey into the origins of chemical diversity, a bit of history on the British chemicals market, and a first-hand account of changes and constants in the work over time. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, from the early days of compound screening libraries, to the mindset of managing a complex product portfolio. We speak about serendipity, the power of making the most of opportunities, and how chemistry looks different when framed by business requirements. As it’s often the case, it’s about humans interacting with each other, the people behind science, and the people behind the market. It doesn’t get more “Bringing Chemistry to Life” than that.
Simon Pearce00:06
To be able to visit customers in places like China, Japan, across America, all over Europe, that was something that I kind of when I started in my career would not have been imaginable.
Paolo 00:17
Many scientists we interview on this show have had multiple chapters in their scientific careers, be it through changing companies or moving between academia and industry. Simon Pearce is an exception to the rule. By his nearly 40 years starting at Maybridge, now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, have offered myriad of opportunities for excitement and discovery. So welcome to another season four episode of Bringing Chemistry to Life. I'm your host Paolo Braiuca, from Thermo Fisher Scientific. And I'm especially excited today to share this conversation with my longtime friend and colleague. We began by asking Simon about his upbringing, and how we first began working at Maybridge.
Simon Pearce01:04
Well, I'd like to say that, you know, I was given a chemistry kit by my parents when I was eight years old. And that started, you know, the sort of lifelong desire to be a chemist. But if I, if I said that I'd be lying, if I'm honest. I did have a chemistry kit when I was when I was younger, I remember that. But no, it's really by chance, if I'm honest. So I took a general sort of suite of exams when I was 16 and actually, my favorite topics were English and history, so not to science at all. But I thought, if I took science at kind of advanced level, then I had a better chance of getting a job. And so I took advanced levels in chemistry and biology. And actually, I didn't do very well. I actually got an F in Chemistry A level, so I actually failed my chemistry. So that was a really bad start. You know, and but, you know, we'll keep that between ourselves Paolo, you know, don't mention it.
Paolo 02:05
There’s only a few thousand listeners, only a few thousand!
Simon Pearce02:09
You know, we don't want human resources to know about that, they might dock my salary or something. But I had a, I had a, an F. So but I, but the school were aware of the challenges I had, and they found a job. I was looking for some, I wasn't going to go to university. And I really needed to find some, some work. So I actually finished my exams, I think on the first day, at school and started full time, on the on the Monday in a full time job as a laboratory assistant. And that love of the laboratory system, I still wasn't doing any real chemistry, I was doing some weights and measures. We were working for a work of a company that made car care products back in the early 1980s. It was really a desire for people to customize their vehicles, their cars, and, but after about 18 months, there were some changes when that company I got made redundant. So I was looking for a job. And I was looking in the local newspapers. And I saw this job for assistant chemist, at a company called Maybridge. And I thought, “Well, I have some laboratory experience. I've got about 18 months working in a lab. I hadn't really done any chemistry in that time, but I at least can apply no harm there.” So I applied for the job as assistant chemist and I was interviewed. I remember my, who was to become my manager, Dr. Ken Morris, who was a very good organic chemist, by where he interviewed me. And at the end of the interview, he said, "Well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. You know, I'll give you a chance." And so he you know, it was a that was opportunity for it. So I started working at Maybridge, and that was in January the 31st 1984. So kind of unbelievably to me 39 years ago, in a couple of weeks’ time.
Paolo 03:57
And you've seen the chemical industry evolving by in in this 40 years. It must have been on an incredibly fascinating journey if you stop and look back. I don't know how often you do that. Do you ever stop and think and, you know, and rebuild it in your mind?
Simon Pearce04:15
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, funnily, funnily enough, we were, during the period of time I was with Maybridge, obviously the business grew a lot and at one point we were a family business then became owned by venture capitalists and at that point we actually had a visit from Her Royal Highness Princess Anne. She came to the lab and she spoke to me and she asked me what changes I'd seen in chemistry, and this was in the mid noughties I guess, and obviously since the 1980s. And I said, "Well, the main thing was of course the introduction of computers." You know, when I started in the lab, we still wrote everything down. We had file indexes, we really did use computers to figure out methods. All of the we have journals, actually physical journals will be delivered every month. And all of that, all of what you did was really, you know, I guess people describe the art of organic synthesis. And it was an art in those days, certainly because you really had to kind of figure out the best method to get to a target molecule, kind of from your own, you know, efforts these days, there's a lot of help, I guess, a lot of computer tools out there a lot of databases of methodologies you can access and then find the routes that you need.
Paolo 05:41
Maybridge was probably a, quite a unique thing, right? Yes. It was really at the forefront of innovation back then. Right. And I guess, perfect place for an organic chemist to be in kind of learning on the job, isn't it?
Simon Pearce05:55
Oh, absolutely. So Maybridge was founded by Dr. Roden Bridgewater, who was a professor at Guy's Hospital. And then he wanted to bring his family up in Cornwall, which is where I, where I'm from where I live, and this is kind of people are not that familiar, is the kind of extreme southwest of England, it's not a big area where there's a lot of high tech jobs. And so, he needed to create sort of his own business. And so, he founded Maybridge and he had some contacts in both the sort of pharmaceutical industry and the agrochemical research industry and he really understood there was a requirement for molecules, heterocyclic, predominantly heterocyclic molecules for screening for against, you know, to discover new drugs or to discover new pesticides or herbicides in the agrochemical world. So, you know, he set the business up, and it grew slowly. But when I joined in 84, I guess maybe it was about 20 chemists working there. And we were pretty much given free rein to create what we liked. We just had a very simple rule, sounds odd today, but we were, we were very clear, we had to make three times our salary plus 10%. So we had to sell enough chemicals to make our salary plus two more. This covered the overheads and this was kind of the rule and pretty much as long as you did that, then you were you were good. And you could just carry on and make. So of course, it favored people who kind of understood what the customers wanted, you couldn't just make any old chemical, you had to make something that the customers desired or wanted to buy. And you could kind of work that out almost by trial and error by offering the compounds to customers, we used to offer common, we'd make a series of compounds, maybe 20, or 30, analogs of around a particular molecule that we'd synthesize new molecule, and then we would offer those to a customer. And they would say whether they wanted to purchase them or not. And so we kind of knew what sort of molecules the customers were interested in. And we sort of target our chemistry around there.
Paolo 08:07
And it is so different than working in an academic environment where you just pursue the discovery and even a failed experiment, there is learning. Well, it certainly is in industry as well. But there's, you know, you always had these sorts of profit target to hit, right. And then you know, you just can't slip here, you know, is that it's life or death at some point, which is really interesting. Do you think you've been lucky at the very beginning? Because it must have been a bit tricky for Maybridge to find qualified personnel in Cornwall, right? It's not like being in the Cambridge area, or either in in Oxford or whatever, London, you know, where, where this, there's plenty of people, you must have been tricky from the sort of HR perspective from the recruiting perspective.
Simon Pearce08:51
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure that was one of the reasons why they, you know, they took the chance with me in the in the first place. I mean, we always struggled, you know. The nearest cinema was probably 30 miles away. There was no nightclubs, there were very little to do. And we did have, you know, a group of younger chemists and particularly if you if you were into the surfing or the sort of the that style in the summer, then Cornwall is a great place to work and to live. In the winter, not so much. And so we were actually a close-knit community. But yes, it was a struggle to recruit people down, we did. And I guess the ones that also, where we were successful, because of the, again, you know, to comment on the freedom we had to kind of create our own chemistry to do our own thing. We weren't following anyone's direction particularly, you know, we could we could make the molecules that interested us so we were a group of chemists who really enjoyed that freedom, and you know, it was worth to come to a kind of fairly remote place to be able to do that whereas the maybe in a larger, more formal organization, they would have a lot more constraints, you know, in terms of what they could actually do.
Paolo 10:07
And back then, you know, between the 80s and the 90s, I mean, that was the time when the pharma companies started looking into, you know, chemical diversities, there were lots of people getting into the sort of combinatorial chemistry. So this is where chemistry went more brutally, right, we were more brute force into exploring the chemical space. And that's when, you know, the screening libraries became extremely popular. So I guess Maybridge was quite at the forefront back then. And were there many other companies doing similar job? And what do you remember of, you know, where the spirit of the scientific community was back then?
Simon Pearce10:47
So I think we're actually quite unique to begin with. Mainly because there were, I mean, we didn't set out to create a collection of screening compounds, we were making small groups of molecules, which we were selling directly to different customers. But if you, it kind of is, it's funny now, but the quantity of compound we used to sell to a customer for screening back in the 1980s was two and a half grams. Now, today, to put that into context, you know, if we sell one milligram or five milligrams, that's plenty for a customer to be able to do multiple screens. But back then the technology wasn't so sophisticated as it is, and they were buying multiple grams. But we, if we have to provide two and a half grams to a customer, then as a chemist you're obviously going to synthesize ideally more than two and a half grams, you don't know what the yield is going to be. So you kind of overestimate you make sure I have plenty. So maybe we get 10 grams of material, then we sell our two and a half grams to the customer. What do you do with the seven and a half? Well, you put it in a bottle, and you put it on the shelf. And, and that's what we did for 10s of thousands of compounds over the years. So we ended up in sort of the 19, the mid 1990s, I guess from a collection of about 50, 55,000 compounds, multiple grams, all of which were solid, all of which were fairly inert, you know, they weren't chemically reactive. And as you say, the big pharmaceutical companies were at that point looking to acquire additional screening compounds, because the automation was starting to kick in, in terms of the large volumes of compounds, they could screen very quickly. But they, of course, synthesizing enough compounds is a challenge. So acquiring commercial compounds was an opportunity. So we had a lot of business, and the business grew very quickly through the 1990s. You know, on the back of that, and there weren't really that many other companies that had, you know, that kind of collection of compounds. So because if you were to look at sort of the, the 1980s, or the landscape of the 1980s, then pharmaceutical companies, I would say in sort of Europe and North America, and Japan, they were they were doing pharmaceutical research and sort of big business, and they had their in-house collections, which they were adding to from commercial vendors like ourselves. And then if you looked at sort of like Eastern Europe, you still had the Soviet Union at that point. And then their model was very different. And it was by state sponsored. And but obviously, after the sort of the fall of the Soviet Union, in kind of the early sort of, I guess, 1990s, there was a real change in terms of kind of larger organizations came out of that had much larger collections. And we take the say that the world leader perhaps in building blocks and screening companies today, Enamine, who are Ukrainian company, came out of kind of that period, but not the only ones. You know, so that's kind of how the business kind of changed. But yes, back in the 1990s, we were in a very strong position. We had some interesting molecules, and obviously that led to us winning the 19, 1996, the Queen's award for export, so it was a that was a big opportunity for the business, but I'll see it then led to some significant changes. Not least the family stepping back, venture capitalist business, you know, purchasing, what was the Maybridge business which ultimately led of course, to the, to the point where today we're part of Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Paolo 14:32
You ever miss your days in the lab?
Simon Pearce14:34
Oh, yes. I think, you know, all of us who've done chemistry, we are certainly I enjoyed the creativity of it. I enjoyed the kind of the designing of the molecules and the success that's the great feeling when you actually synthesized something that you actually set out to make you know, sometimes they were quite challenging. So, so yes, I do miss that. But you know, it was kind of an evolution for me. I spent about 16 years in the lab. Okay. You know, I ended up from kind of starting, you know, as an assistant chemist with kind of, you know, basically washing out the glassware in the lab and doing fairly general jobs to chemistry manager. I had several teams reporting to me. I was kind of, I had my last sort of significant chemistry job, I actually had 32 chemists working on a single project for a large pharma company. I do remember kind of the couple of last projects, I had actually, I think, you know, show the breadth of this the sort of the chemistry that we did, because I had two projects, one was actually a diabetes diagnostic kit. So this was a chemical compound that went into a kit that was able to measure blood sugar levels into kind of an electronic device that was able to tell you whether your blood sugar was too low or not. So that was a medical device. But then at the same time, I was also working on another project for a toy company in Canada. So this company were making a, their project was a toy bubble, like a soap bubble that you blow. And so but this bubble, and I think they call them Zubbles when they marketed them, it had a primary color, like red or green color, and you blew that and you could see this colored bubble and then the color disappears, right, so you don't get a nasty red stain on your mother's kitchen surface, or whatever. But it was it was down to an indicator dye that was in the bubble solution. And the large surface area, the bubble, meant that as it as it drifted through the air, it reacted with the with the oxygen, and that reduced the pH and the color disappeared. And so that was another project that we were involved in. So very different, you know, both chemical, put both heterocyclic compounds, one in a really kind of a key diagnostic kit for medical device and another in kid’s toys. So kind of shows the breadth of how chemicals can be used.
Paolo 17:15
We hope you're enjoying this episode of Bringing Chemistry to Life. I just wanted to steal a few seconds from the interview to tell you about chem dex, the new tool for organic chemists on thermofisher.com. If you do synthetic chemistry for a living, give it a shot. It's full of useful information and a much faster way to find the products you need to run your reactions. You find it at thermofisher.com/chemdex, that is C-H-E-M-D-E-X. Check it out. It's free. And now back to our conversation.
Paolo 17:49
People say that chemists, chemistry is somehow a sort of a slowly evolving science. So even a science which is dead in the sense, there's no much going on, right? And perhaps us that's an impression you can get if you compare it to, you know, some of the biological sciences that are, you know, so progressing so fast, you know. Think about genetic sciences, and you know, some of the molecular biology, you know, how have they changed the world, you know, how much is going on at the moment. But the reality is that there's a lot going on in even in organic chemistry, right. And if you think about how, you did compounds, you know, just a few years ago, or how organic chemistry looks today. And you know how we look back in the eighties, I guess, I guess it's pretty different. What's your perspective? It's quite a unique opportunity to speak with someone who has seen it all.
Simon Pearce18:46
Well, I think, you know, absolutely. For a start, I think you've got to kind of separate the organic synthesis from sort of the, if you like the organic chemicals and the chemistry because synthesis itself hasn't changed dramatically. I guess in the years since I've been doing it. Yes, we've had some, some new techniques. When I was when I was first in organic chemistry, we did a lot of carbonyl chlorides were a popular functional group we used to make, even though they were very reactive. So they didn't last very long. They weren't very stable. And they were they were difficult to handle. They had lots of issues. And then, you know, people discovered, you know, coupling reagents and we could use carboxylic acids, and now we have a much more stable functional group and we can use coupling reagents for those. So things kind of changed. And obviously then in the 80s, we had sort of palladium cross coupling chemistry, you know, Suzuki and that sort of carbon-carbon bond formation that was an obviously you know, suddenly boronic acids were, and esters were really big in terms of functional groups. I used to do a lot of chemistry back in the early 80s that are still a chemistry with tributylstannane compounds that were kind of, I guess, early, earlier carbon-carbon bond, you know, functional groups people used to use, but much less kind of clean a lot more, you know, obviously, our tin compounds are not nice, they weren't actually very nice to synthesize.
Paolo 20:17
Is anybody doing that these days?
Simon Pearce20:19
Well, I think there are a couple of situations where you do need to use them because you just can't get them, the boronic compounds are not stable. But so, you know, occasionally they can be used, but for the most part, they've obviously been replaced. So yes, there's been, there's been, you know, there's been shifts in terms of organic synthesis in terms of the sort of reactions out there, but I think much more importantly, is how the compounds are used, you know. It's the so many sorts of, as, you know, you said earlier, when we were talking about the sort of the diabetes diagnostic and the toy, the breath of organic chemistry, I mean, we recently introduced a range of organic molecules that are used in solar cells, you know, organic photovoltaics. And I know, you interviewed a lady from the KAUST University on one of these podcasts who was working in this kind of area. You know, and that certainly wasn't an area of research at all in the 1980s, you know. So the uses for organic molecules and how they can be used, it continues to be to go out, you know, whether that be, you know, in traditional, more traditional disciplines, like the pharmaceutical drug discovery, or whether it be, you know, agrochemical research and creating better, you know, and cleaner, more targeted, sort of herbicides, and all, you know, sort of, by the way through to sort of new technologies, so the material science, you know, where we're kind of making kind of new materials, how we're using, you know, organic molecules in things like screens, and, you know, sort of foldable, foldable phones, you know, cell phones or mobile phones weren't, you know, weren't a thing. But now, of course, a lot of organic compounds are used in these kinds of devices, too. So I think, you know, that there's, there's so much variety, and so much the kind of new things to discover in organic chemistry that it continues to excite me all the time.
Paolo 22:37
And it does seem to me, you said, you said it so well. Simon, you're a man of many stories, right? I as always, you know, I could speak to you forever and just tell me one. You know in your 39-year career you have some funny ones, but, you know, why don't you pick one that, you know, it's worth remembering?
Simon Pearce23:02
Okay. Well, I will. Well, I mentioned the thiols early on, and I, and you commented about this, there is a story there. So, as I mentioned, the thiols are extremely smelly chemicals. And if you're working with them, then you can be extremely careful that you don't get exposed, otherwise you'll end up you know, without many friends. And, and on this occasion, I was, I worked with a lot of different thiols early on in my career. And the other thing to remember about thiols is that because they smell really strongly and actually kind of knock out the olfactory nerve in the nose. So after, after a few seconds, you can smell the smell but then the smell disappears. So as far as you're concerned, there isn't any odor. But of course there is. But it's just that you are no longer capable of, of smelling it. So, and I must have accidentally I think spilled a couple of drops of a solution that contained a thiol onto my work boots whilst I was in the lab, one afternoon and so but you know, I hadn't realize this I finished up what I was doing, I jumped into my car I was on my own so there was no one to tell me that this had happened. And I drove the 30 or so miles back to my home. At the time, my wife and I had two young children and my wife worked in the evenings. We were, we would as many young families do, I worked during the day I used to get home from work, and she would have fed the children and then she would head out to work for the evening and I would look after the children put them to bed. So that was my job for the evening. So I got back now obviously I would always take my work boots off. I wouldn't come into the house with the boots on, so I removed, that was often the first thing I did when I got back having worked in a lab all day was take a shower. So I took a shower and after I was, after I'd taken a shower, then I say, say goodbye to my wife and I got the children ready for bed, at which point there was kind of a loud knocking on the front door. And there was someone from the gas company. And so I mentioned that these thiols are used in natural gas to give them the smell so that people can detect to leak. And my boots that have been sat outside the front door, they had actually, they had the smell from those boots, believe it or not had actually wafted around up the estate where we lived was maybe a couple of 100 houses, somebody, some neighbor had complained of the smell of gas, there was clearly a gas leak in the area, they'd sent an emergency response team out to scour the neighborhood to see if they could detect this leak and the guy knocking on my doors was indeed someone from the gas company to find out whether I smelled gas, and indeed knew if there was any kind of gas leak. And so when I told him that, in all honesty, it was almost certainly my boots, because I was a chemist, and I was working in chemistry lab, and I worked with these compounds. And he was able to kind of prove from taking a quick smell, that this indeed was where the smell was coming from. So I was, I was told to, to make sure that they were sealed away, and they couldn't. So that was one story. And that was well, I caused a major gas alert that, as you say, colored a sample of those as you as you get over, over, over many years of doing chemistry.
Paolo 26:41
Yeah, this I started laughing because I knew the story. And this is unbelievable, right? And it's incredible how, you know, it's probably been just a drop, and how bad their staff can smell, you can get the smell in your whole, you know, estate and the, you know, cause an actual emergency in the town, is kind of unbelievable. This is a funny story; it is a funny story. So thanks. After, after all the stories know, all these experiences, you know, in your 39 years, what takes you still out of bed in the morning, you know, what excites you about your job?
Simon Pearce27:22
I think is, you know, the there are so many things, as I said, you know, there's a combination of the, of the research, you know. One of the things that I was really, I mean, I guess, you know, looking back one of the one of the reasons that I really felt, you know, I guess I wanted to put the work in, as you mentioned. It was really tough actually, when I started at Maybridge and doing the chemistry but, you know, I mentioned, you know, a couple of years earlier, my father had become very ill and I've kind of had, you know, experiences of kind of, you know, the impact of diseases and the impact they have on families. And so kind of working in a kind of research environment where I was making compounds that in some way, you know, contributed to kind of, you know, solving some of those problems was really, you know, for me, really exciting. And, and the still is, you know, and one of the biggest, although I wasn't directly involved, you know, back in the sort of the, the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, some of the chemists that I worked with, you know, they were worked with a company called Oculus Pharmaceuticals, you know, in helping to discover the drug, Olaparib, which is sold as Lynparza. It's an anti-cancer drug for primary treatment for ovarian cancer. And there's been a lot written about how successful it's been and how important a drug that is. And, you know, we played a small part in that. So that's something that I know, everybody who was involved is extremely proud of. And that sort of came from the team that were there in Tintagel that at the time, you know, involved in that. But, you know, subsequently, there'd be many other, you know, other projects. And, you know, also the ability, you know, we've had, you know, a couple of years now of the pandemic where the travels been a lot less. Last year, I started to visit customers and you know, I went to Stockholm and to Germany. So a couple of small but, you know, previously to that, to be able to visit customers in places like China, Japan, yeah, across America all over Europe. You know, that was something that I kind of when I started in my career would not have been imaginable, you know, you know, I grew up in a small-town fishing town, my, my father was a fisherman. You know, I think the furthest he ever went in his whole life was London twice. You know, I didn't travel abroad at all until I was probably my 20s. When I went to France, that was exciting. To me that, the opportunities that the career has afforded me to meet all these people to see these different cultures to experience. All that gets me out of bed in the morning, you know, that's exciting, you know, what's the day going to bring,
Paolo 30:30
After all these experience, and you know, what you've been through what you've seen, or what you know, about the market, and you know, and how you've seen your own career, but you know, also the one of many, many other people and former colleagues and such, what would be a piece of advice you would give to someone to starting their careers?
Simon Pearce30:50
I think just take the opportunities that, you know, that come your way, I mean, there's always a certain amount of luck, we talked about it, you know, with everything, but at the same time, you do make your own luck to a certain degree. As I mentioned that trip to Switzerland to give the talk, the first talk, I wasn't the most senior chemist in the team by any means, at that point. There were others that had to kind of the first opportunity to go but said, "No, you know, this is outside of my comfort zone, I'm not, I don't feel it's something for me." And it was outside of my comfort zone, in all honesty, and I have watched, but you know, I took the opportunity, and it paid off. And I actually started to get asked to do more things and that grew. So I think, maybe take advantage, you know, take advantage of the opportunities as they arise. But at the same time, and this is something, perhaps you know, that, you know, again, for my own perspective, try and find something that you enjoy doing, don't necessarily think that, you know, that you have to kind of reach a very senior position, or to have a job that just because of a title or whatever, it's something, for me at least, it's important to kind of like enjoy the job that I'm doing. You know, I've been very lucky, over close to 40 years to find myself, you know, doing a variety of different jobs, working in the lab working, sort of managing teams of chemists then working in a more commercial role, traveling, all of that I've really enjoyed. So I think for me, the advice would be to take advantages of the opportunities as they come your way. Don't be you know, put off you know, it might seem scary, some of these might seem scary, but they're actually when you when you know, when you do them, it might turn out to be something that really, you know, you enjoy and I think I want to do that.
Paolo 33:06
That was Simon Pearce, Senior Product Manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Thanks for joining us for this season four episode of Bringing Chemistry to Life and keep an ear out for more. If you enjoy this conversation, you ensure to enjoy Simon's book, video, podcasts, and other content recommendations. Look in the Episode Notes in your app for a URL where you can access these recommendations and register for a free Bringing Chemistry to Life t-shirt. This episode was produced by Sarah Briganti, Matt Ferris, and Matthew Stock.