Feds block homegrown mass spec export

Ron Grey's company GBC Scientific Instruments makes one of the fastest and most sensitive mass spectrometers available. But the Victorian company has run into a big problem -- laws in Australia put into place to counter the development of weapons of mass destruction by other countries are making it almost impossible for the company to export its instruments.

The problem was highlighted at the award dinner given to honour winners of this year's Clunies-Ross National Science and Technology Awards; one of which was awarded to GBC founder and managing director Ron Grey. In front of a sympathetic audience, Grey outlined the problems he has had in getting permission to export his award-winning instruments.

The situation is so serious that Grey is planning to move part of his company, which exports 90 per cent of its products overseas, to Malaysia later this year.

"It's absolutely heartbreaking, and what's more it's just so stupid," he says.

GBC Scientific Instruments got its start in 1978, when Grey and a couple of colleagues started manufacturing low cost atomic absorption spectrometers, an instrument first developed by Sir Allen Walsh at the CSIRO.

"The idea was that we'd sell them for under $5000 to schools," Grey says. "Pretty soon we found that was wrong."

But Grey persevered, making a few sales, and after a trip overseas to drum up business he came back to position the company as an export business, gradually building up a network of distributors and adding new products like UV/visible spectrometers and improving existing ones.

In the mid-1980s ICI purchased half of the company, with the proceeds of the sale going into R&D. The company further improved its product line and started developing a time-of-flight mass spectrometer and HPLC. Acquisitions also broadened the company's product range and GBC grew to a couple of hundred people, says Grey.

But with the sale of ICI Australia by its parent company in the UK, everything changed. "GBC became an appendage and they put us up for sale to our competitors," says Grey. "That was my life's work -- I didn't want that."

So Grey fought back, mortgaging everything "including the wife and kids" to buy the company himself. The risky move paid off, Grey has got his mortgage back and the company has been growing really well, he says.

During the years of pressure, GBC spent about $7 million developing an inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ICP-TOF MS), an instrument so exquisitely sensitive it can detect every element and isotope in a sample to parts per trillion within 10 seconds. It selling point, according to Grey, is that it can process samples 10 times faster than its competitors, making it ideal for analysing transient samples.

And Grey believes that the instrument could potentially capture 20 per cent of the $US250 million market. At the moment, it is still well ahead of its competitors.

"We've got this wonderful new technology, the ability to sell and a factory to make it," Grey says. "We've got the ability to develop a $100 million export business here in Melbourne."

But here is the Catch-22. Over the last 30-odd years, Australia has been party to various international agreements to stop countries developing weapons of mass destruction. In addition to the sale of uranium, these agreements restrict the sale and export of dual use instruments that could conceivably be of use to make bombs or other weapons.

And listed among the dual use instruments on the trigger list is the mass spectrometer, which means that GBC has to get an export permit to sell any of their top-of-the-line instruments overseas.

A mass spectrometer can be used to measure the enrichment ratio of isotopes, but as Grey points out, at $200,000 it's a very expensive way to perform a task that a simple, inexpensive Geiger counter can do just as effectively. And Geiger counters can be made using about $60 worth of easily obtainable radio parts, he says.

Getting a permit from the department of defence, which administrates the trigger list, has become a bureaucratic nightmare, says Grey, with the stated turnaround of 10-14 days stretching to 12 months or more.

"We're getting orders left, right and centre, but we're not going to be able to fill them," says. GBC currently has $AUD443 million of letters of credit and $2 million worth of orders that have been stopped by the process of obtaining a permit.

A recent export of the ICP-TOF mass spectrometer to Iran's Nuclear Research Centre for Agriculture and Medicine took 18 months to go through. The instrument is being used to enrich radioisotopes for medical diagnostics.

"We were told by the Department of Defence that it would go into a nuclear weapons facility, but it actually went into an agricultural and medical facility, similar to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney," Grey says.

Besides, he points out, the Iranians already have a variety of mass spectrometers capable of similar functions, so it's not a case of supplying a totally new technology to the country.

An independent opinion obtained by the company from RMIT applied chemistry professor Peter Cullis suggests "almost any scientific instrument may be considered as implicated in the production of weapons of mass destruction." Cullis goes on to say that the all-encompassing view embraced by Australia's laws actually contravenes the basic principles of the treaties and acts as a strong impediment to trade.

But all of Grey's efforts to bring attention to the issue have been met with deaf ears. While the permits are not supposed to restrict trade, the Department of Defence just vetoes everything, he claims, and don't really care if they destroy an Australian business.

"These people won't even talk to me. We're being strangled, absolutely strangled," he says. "At the very least we need to go through the list and figure out countries that are not a problem. That should be easy, a formality."

Grey believes the problem would be made manageable if appropriate procedures and scientifically trained personnel were put into place to evaluate each application rapidly.

In the meantime, with a heavy heart, Grey has started the process of moving his all-Australian company overseas, where there are better margins and higher profits to be made. "I'd say we'll be away this year," he says.