oxide catalyst business. The action marks the first publicly disclosed withdrawal from an active opera­tion under Carbide's new program to divest or shut down unprofitable or nonstrategic business lines (C&EN, Sept. 2, page 6).

Each of the eight businesses in the consumer and industrial prod­ucts and services group, which is run by H. F. Tomfohrde III, is man­aged by a unit president. They are: George E. Bailie, films and packag­ing; Alan C. Egler, home and auto­motive products; Frank P. Holloway, electronics; Philip J. Kennedy, bat­teries; John R. MacLean, industrial gases; Frank V. McMillen, Umetco Minerals Corp.; William F. Silvia, catalysts and services; and Vance E. Sonnenberg, carbon products.

The presidents are responsible for worldwide strategic direction and financial performance of their units. Continuing to manage Carbide's in­terests in overseas subsidiaries and affiliates in Tomfohrde's group are the company's area chairmen: Ash­ley W. Lutz, Union Carbide East­ern; James W. Rawlings, Union Car­bide Southern Africa; Kenneth D. Rutter, Union Carbide Pan Ameri­ca; and Nathan L. Zutty, Union Car­bide Europe. All report to Tom­fohrde.

In announcing the organization, which follows a string of high-level reassignments in Carbide's manage­ment, Tomfohrde emphasized the quality of the personnel that will be reporting to him. "New organi­zations do not win games in the competitive marketplace; people do," he said. "I'm confident that we have the people who can win in any of the competitive arenas in which we have elected to compete."

The performance of Tomfohrde's group is expected to be the key to Carbide's effort to revitalize its fi­nancial results. In the company's massive restructuring, which will entail nearly $1 billion in write-offs, divestitures, and staff reduction charges, the bulk of the cuts will take place in the chemicals and plas­tics group, run by Robert D. Ken­nedy. Some two thirds of the work­force reduction is expected to come in Kennedy's group.

The ethylene oxide catalyst busi­ness, for instance, is in Kennedy's

area. In announcing the company's withdrawal from the business, he said that the move is part of the company's program to consolidate its various lines of business and re­deploy its resources to areas of stra­tegic importance.

Separately, Labor Secretary Wil­liam E. Brock ordered the Occupa-

Paul J. Flory, a physical chemist whose work on polymers won him the Nobel Prize in 1974, died of a massive heart attack on Sunday, Sept. 8. He was 75.

Flory was to have spoken at the American Chemical Society meet­ing in Chicago last Tuesday to the Division of Polymer Chemistry about his analysis of the abrupt col­lapse of randomly coiled polymer chains in poor solvents in terms of his solvent-polymer interaction pa­rameter x- He left his Portola Valley, Calif., home to spend the weekend writing in Big Sur, 30 miles south of Monterey. He was found dead in his car there on Monday.

Born in Sterling, 111., Flory was a pioneer in polymer chemistry. His studies in solution theory, statistics of polymer molecules, and the the­ory of phase transitions of polymers have been particularly influential.

He used his Nobel Prize to pub­licize the struggle for human rights around the world.

Flory received his doctorate from Ohio State University in 1934. His research career included stints at Du Pont's Experimental Station, the University of Cincinnati , Exxon Chemical, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Mellon Institute, and Cornell Uni­versity. Most recently, he was pro­fessor emeritus at Stanford Univer­sity and a consultant to IBM's re­search laboratory in San Jose, Calif.

Polymer chemists routinely have cited Flory's papers and books as their experiments verified his theo­retical analyses or as they built on his work. His trip to Chicago would have embroiled him yet again in the ongoing controversy about the response of rubber to stretching. Flo­ry reasoned that for small stretching forces, rubber is stiffer, because the crosslink junctions are entangled

tional Safety & Health Administra­tion to inspect all the equipment at Carbide's chemical plant in Insti­tute, W.Va. The inspection, which will be conducted by five teams of OSHA specialists, will begin Sept. 17 and last two to three months. A toxic gas leak there Aug. 11 injured 135 people. •

with neighboring chains. As the force increases, the junctions slip free of entanglements, and the rub­ber becomes less stiff. Others argue that entangled crosslinks impede rubber stretching at all values of the stretching force. •

Soviets offer chemical weapons-free zone Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has offered to honor a chemical weapons-free zone in central Eu­rope if the U.S. would agree to such a proposal.

Gorbachev made this suggestion to Johannes Rau, vice chairman of West Germany's opposition Social Democratic Party, in a meeting in Moscow. As reported by the Soviet news agency Tass, Gorbachev said his country would "guarantee and respect" such a zone if agreement could be reached between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The Soviet leader

Paul J. Flory, Nobel Laureate, dead at 75

September 16, 1985 C&EN 7