Louisiana polymer laboratory production scaling anecdote

Standalone parable. Chemical company's order for 10g of a novel polymer triggers a graduate-student-orders-from-third-party-who-orders-from-graduate-student Ponzi loop. Illustrates that "commercially available" can be a recursive fiction for boutique materials.

There's a story out of Louisiana that some laboratory had invented a wonderful new polymer, and a chemical company decided they wanted to get some of it. They went to a company and said, we'd like to buy some of this polymer that we'd read a paper about. The company had never heard of this polymer. They researched it and found out it was made by this professor in Louisiana, who'd published the paper on it. They called him up and said, I'd like to buy ten grams of this material. He says, I can probably arrange that, I'll get a graduate student to work on it. The graduate student looks at how this material was made and thinks, this is pretty difficult. So they decided to look and see if it was commercially available. They found this company that listed they would provide it. She called them and said, I'd like to buy ten grams. The company said, sure, we have a source for that. So they upped their order to the professor for twenty grams — this is a business beginning to grow, if you can see this Ponzi scheme going. The graduate student was now going to have to make twenty grams, so she was going to have to order twenty grams.