From a pile of chicken poop to a pile of money…one scientist’s 30-year obsession with a fowl problem

Alexander Fleming did it with penicillin, the 3M guy did it with Post-It notes, and the widely used lubricant WD-40 is a product made by it. What is it? Turning an unexpected discovery or observation into something useful and/or profitable.

Picture this – 30 years ago, a scientist at North Carolina State University working on a poultry waste digester to convert chicken manure to methane gas for power generation noticed that shed feathers in the chicken “poop” disappeared in the process of digestion. He reasoned that there was some unique microbe that was able to digest the keratin protein in the feathers and use it to grow. After many years of painstaking work by his graduate students and technicians, he isolated a special strain of bacteria (Bacillus licheniformis) that produced a unique enzyme (keratinase) that was particularly effective at digesting chicken feathers. That scientist’s name? Prof. Jason Shih, Professor of Poultry Science at NC State University (now retired). And what became of the enzyme? Prof. Shih and his son, Dr. Giles Shih, co-founded a company, BioResource International, Inc. (BRI), 10 years ago to commercialize Prof. Shih’s patents. Today BRI is producing and supplying innovative enzyme products (Versazyme and Valkerase) to poultry producers all over the world.

For more details about Prof. Shih’s serendipitous discovery and how it launched a global biotechnology enterprise, please read about the “Accidental Enzyme” or visit www.briworldwide.com.