In the 1990s he led the tiny team of chemists at Monsanto that invented the stomach-friendly painkillers Celebrex and Bextra.

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But today Professor Andy Cooper and his team of chemists at the University of Liverpool in England are figuring out how it can help energy companies like BP or Shell store and transport methane gas, the principle component of natural gas.

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Zelmac, a chemical discovered in the 1980s by chemists at what is now Novartis, almost didn't make it to the FDA. Clinical research staff balked at large-scale trials, but the drug caught the eye of Novartis Chief Executive Dan Vasella .

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Yet with little pause for reflection, his reward has been a very lucrative continuing career, first as chief executive of Alliance Boots, the chemists' chain, and now in charge at Gala Coral, the leisure and bookmaker chain.

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Chemists at Britain's National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) plan to make the batteries using Sellafield's large store of waste plutonium.

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Schlecker, a chain of discount chemists, recently shut down some shops and sacked the workers, but at the same time opened bigger ones with temporary staff at lower pay.

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Kindly chemists kept him surreptitiously supplied, and kinder friends tried to take it away or at least restrict the dose.

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