Laboratories For Entrepreneurs

The government wanted Gary Seawright to help cattlemen keep track of their herds. His "failure" spawned a whole new business.

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Although many of the national labs conduct secret research for military and intelligence agencies, unclassified work usually goes on right down the corridor.

Take the Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atom bomb. There, veterinarian Gary Seawright spent several years working on an electronic-identification system for livestock -- a project of the Department of Agriculture. Seawright's concern was for animal disease control, and the system would have allowed tracking of cattle from sales and feed barns right through to slaughter pens.

Only thing was that cattlemen weren't ready for it, which was all Seawright needed to stir his own entrepreneurial urges. He and his team reworked their idea a bit and came up with an application in the transportation field, tracking rail cars and ship-to-truck cargo containers as they move through seaports and rail yards around the country. The idea looked so promising that the Los Alamos lab helped them to secure the patents on the concept.

Patent in hand, Seawright quit the lab, rounded up $500,000 in seed capital from a Dallas investor, and founded Amtech Corp., which he located down the street from the Los Alamos lab. For his staff, he brought in five key members of the original research crew. Los Alamos was quite decent about it. The lab's legal staff was very helpful in the reassignment process of the two patents to Amtech. And a few of Amtech's principals were granted two-year leaves of absence, with their old jobs guaranteed if the company flopped.

Instead, the company is growing. In its second year of operation, Amtech last year booked $300,000 in sales. The company now has a $150,000 contract with American President Lines, a major shipping company, and another contract with Union Switch & Signal Division to package and market the system to railroads and mass-transit authorities worldwide. And turnpike operators in the Northeast see in the system a way to unclog congestion at toll plazas, where computers could automatically identify a commuter vehicle and bill at the end of the month; the car wouldn't even have to stop. The first installation: New York's Triborough Bridge.