Somebody mentioned jellyfish in another thread and it remined me of
something. I had my business in a sorta "techie lab incubator space"
when I first started out and one tenant was a weird biologist who got
into harvesting cannonball jellyfish. He was developing methods of
"treating" them to extract collagen for beauty products. His process
involved soaking lots of em in a lye solution and then pressure
cooking em. Some days the whole lab stank like a chinese restaurant
gone bad. When I got to work, I'd have to call my machinists and tell
em whether to come to work or not depending on the "density" of the
smell.
The jellies were bad enough but then the same guy had a project
involving chicken****. I am serious, he actually had funding to
somehow take chickenhouse waste and treat it to extract protein that
would then be turned into MORE chicken feed. I told him this sounded
too much like perpetual motion for me.
Then he got into a project involving treating cancer to make it more
susceptible to radiation. He wouldnt tell anybody about his plans
except that it involved medical imaging and he hinted it was NMR
(magnetic resonance). One day some laborers started unloading some
weird machinery and lots of heavy gray blocks. I pointed to one and
said "What are those". The guy (a mexican) said "Damn Beeg Fookin
Magnets for the NMR machine, See they stick together". I was
skeptical. When I saw one with a dime sized hole all the way through
it I realized this wasnt NMR, it was a Fu87ng GAMMA RAY source and
said "Those arent magnets, its lead shielding and they arent sticking
together, they're just damned heavy" After I cooled off and made the
bio guy promise the machien would not operate here, he asked me to
write a part of his proposal and I agreed. However, I backed out when
I found they would be doing trials on prisoners on China.
Then there was the ANTHRAX stuff .............(this was in 1999 and of
course in 2001 I called the FBI).
When we were finally moving out of there, there had been some large
freezers I had never looked into. One of my engineers came into my
office very wide eyed and said "let's get outta here, you dont want to
know whats in those freezers..."