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Dr. Shulgin
Profile/Backgrounder: 6/11/08
A Russian scientist who helped
clean up soil contaminated in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has
joined the staff of a Louisville, Ky.-based agribusiness.
Dr. Alexander Shulgin, 56, joined the payroll of Monty’s Plant
Food Company in April, shortly after he attained permanent
residency status in the United States. As the company’s chief
scientist, he will lead research into ways to enrich poor soil and
promote plant health through products such as Monty’s foliar plant
food and soil conditioner.
“We are very excited to have one of the world’s leading humic
scientists working with our team on a daily basis,” Monty’s
Chairman & CEO, Kevin Voss said.
Shulgin holds or co-holds more than 50 patents, and has authored
or co-authored more than 80 scientific articles or books.
“Alex is one extraordinary man,” one of Monty’s Board members and
a shareholder, Dave McEwan said. “He’s the closest I’ve ever been
to a genius, and I’ve been around some really smart guys in my
life.” “He’s a problem solver. He can look at soils and tell you,
‘This is what you need to do,’ and figure out how to do it,”
McEwan said. “We all look to him, when we see run into a problem,
and ask him what to do.”
Shulgin grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the former Soviet
Union. He earned a doctorate at the Moscow Mining Institute, where
he would also serve a researcher and professor until 1990. The
government valued him for his expertise in removing harmful
substances from soil, and called on him when a nuclear reactor in
the Ukraine caught fire, sending deadly radioactive particles into
the air for hundreds of miles.
“Nobody knew what to do, because a big area was contaminated,”
Shulgin said. “The task was how to bind the radioactive particles,
and not allow them to be spread out in nature.” To keep the
particles from leaching into the water supply, Shulgin implemented
the use of processed humic acid, a carbon compound that he has
studied extensively. He pioneered a way to mass-produce it at a
reasonable cost for practical applications more than 20 years ago.
That research led him to find other uses for the compound. For
example, he used it to render harmless the cancer-causing PCBs
that contaminated the ground around a Moscow plant that made
electrical transformers.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, Shulgin found
opportunities to put his knowledge to work overseas, including a
U.S. Department of Energy project conducted at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee. A fellow scientist, Louisville
resident Andy Eckles III, the former chief scientist for the U.S.
Army in Europe, went into business with Shulgin and put up his own
money to bring him back and forth from Russia to the United States
for consultations. “Dr. Shulgin was and is continuing to do some
impressive things with humic acid.” Eckles said. “But he’s been
reserved in talking about them.”
Through Eckles, Shulgin connected with Monty Justice, a co-founder
of Monty’s Plant Food Company, in 1999. Shulgin was able to
improve Justice’s liquid plant food because he was using a
manufacturing process that provided a more activated humic, a key
ingredient to the Monty’s products. As a result, Monty’s
incorporated Dr. Shulgin’s humics into all its liquid fertilizer
products and still does today.
Alexander’s work in the United States convinced him that this
country offered many great opportunities for scientists who want
to make useful products from their research. Also, funding for
research in Russia had become very hard to obtain. Shulgin
obtained a visa, and in 2005 he became an associate professor at
the University of Louisville. He became a permanent resident
earlier this year after the U.S. ICS officially declared him an
extraordinary scientist.
Since becoming a resident, he has worked on several new product
ideas for Monty’s as well as on a host of other projects that
include removing heavy metals from soils contaminated by Hurricane
Katrina, as well as a project to make arable soil from the sand in
the Middle Eastern country of Dubai.
Wherever his research for Monty’s leads him, he’ll no doubt find a
practical application for it. For him, that’s the ultimate goal of
science. “Science creates a practical application, and practical
applications create a new task for science,” he said. |
