If polymers are the building blocks of creative science, then a Carnegie Mellon University professor and his research team are genies who can make consumer wishes come true.

	Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Plastics expert Dr. Krzysztof Matyjaszewski shows a poster of an atomic microscopic view of a polymer in his office in the Mellon Institute, Oakland. Dr. Matyjaszewski's team at Carnegie Mellon University has produced new methods of making plastics with sugar and vitamin C. Click photo for larger image.

Need something brutally hard on one side but soft and fuzzy on the other? They'll produce it. Need something kitten soft on top but with a sticky underside? They'll make a plastic polymer that adheres and purrs.

Or perhaps you need a polymer that breaks down in the environment or one that withstands the severest weather conditions. They've already created them.

But in their latest chemistry trick -- in what mistakenly might sound as though they've turned plastics into snack food -- the Carnegie Mellon University team is using sugars and vitamin C to produce complex polymers more efficiently and with fewer environmental consequences.

While these polymers won't fill the belly, they will make production of specialized plastics cheaper, easier and safer.

Using sugars and vitamin C to reduce the amount of copper catalyst in his "atom transfer reactionary polymerization" process, Dr. Krzysztof Matyjaszewski has made the creation of new polymers "at least 100 times more efficient and much more amenable to industrial processes."

Dr. Matyjaszewski -- CMU's J.C. Warner Professor of Natural Sciences and director of the Center for Macromolecular Engineering in the Mellon College of Science -- developed the ATRP process in the mid-1990s. It's still being used to produce specialty polymers for coatings, adhesives, lubricants, cosmetics and electronics, among other uses.

The key to the ATRP process is its ability to combine chemically diverse polymer subunits, or "monomers," into blends to produce specialized polymers or plastics of any molecular weight, be it for cosmetics, pigment dispersing, coatings, emulsions or even self-cleaning paints.

The idea is to tailor plastics for precise applications, including the creation of "smart" materials that respond to altered environments including changes in pressure, acidity or light exposure.

Imagine a football player who breaks a bone in a game. One idea in the works would be a liquid plastic that can be injected into the broken bone and harden immediately so the football player can continue playing.

In a specified time, the bone-hard plastic would break down as new bone is created to repair the break, without requiring the player to miss time due to injury.

Or imagine a plastic that attaches to cancer cells and only cancer cells. The plastic could contain a dye so doctors can identify where every cancer cell exists in the body or include a drug to kill the cancer as the plastic dissolves.

How this works requires an understanding of how conventional polymers are created, then taking that process to an even more clever level where new-age materials are designed.

Polymer subunits can be strung together into chains to create useful new materials. Such polymers can be strengthened further or altered depending on other chemical processes.

For example, rubber is a polymer. By adding sulfur, then vulcanizing or heating it, it becomes a more durable polymer used to make tires. By adding a catalyst to the polymer, propylene, the molecules grow instantaneously into long molecular chains to produce polypropylene, a much more rugged and durable plastic.

But with his ATRP process, Dr. Matyjaszewski and his team took that process many steps beyond the pale of traditional plastics by developing new ways of combining polymers that previously could not be combined. The result is even more exotic new-age materials.

The method Dr. Matyjaszew-ski developed more than a decade ago requires introduction of copper as a catalyst to force two incompatible polymers to be restructured into new materials with characterizations of both parents. The results include a material ideal for rubber bands that remain elastic but never will turn brittle and break.

However, copper in such polymers created discoloration and potential environmental problems due to the amount used, forcing producers to remove copper from the final product in an expensive and time-consuming procedure.

So Dr. Matyjaszewski recently improved his own controlled-radical-polymerization process by using sugar and antioxidants such as vitamin C that reuse the copper catalyst, reducing the amount of expensive copper by as much as a thousandfold.

The process can be used to create plastics that forever remain moist for use in contact lenses, coatings that never stain and polymers that break down at precise rates. The latter makes it feasible to infuse drugs in the material, which releases medication at a set rate, be it an hour, day, week or month.

Dr. Matyjaszewski's process has been licensed to companies in the United States, Europe and Japan that use it in commercial production to make sealants that do not stain and a time-release polymer, which is undergoing animal testing. Another use is a polymer that disperses pigments more uniformly in materials, he said.

The process increases control of molecular structure, and allows the addition of one molecule at a time, to create polymers that "behave in very special ways," ranging from soft hydrogels that never go dry to fluffy, mushy plastics that can be used for multiple purposes, he said.

The Matyjaszewski team, for example, created a special polymer that mimics the adhesion qualities of a gecko's feet. But the powerful adhesion readily releases its grip when the user so desires.

"They are very specially designed for special functions," he said. "My belief is that we are getting closer and closer to total control of molecular architecture."

In addition to his research, he's working to complete a four-volume textbook on macromolecular engineering scheduled for publication next year. It will include history and a comprehensive explanation of processes used to make polymers.

His team of 25 researchers include 18 graduate students and seven postdoctoral students and researchers.

"We have a group of really talented people," Dr. Matyjaszewski said. "Now we are working on how to make things easy, cheap and safe."

Not to mention hard, fuzzy and sticky.