From melamine to cocaine, they see it all

Food safety scares could give Peabody firm's state-of-the-art testing a much higher profile

Dr. Robert B. Cody Jr. ran a dollar bill through a slot on a copier-size machine. A moment later, a graph on a nearby computer screen spiked.

"See that line there? That's the cocaine on the dollar bill," Cody said. "Pretty much any dollar bill that's been in circulation will have trace amounts of cocaine on it."

At JEOL in Peabody, where Cody is product manager, such testing is common. He has checked fruit to make sure it was free of pesticides and fungicides, and identified flame retardant in carpeting at the company's offices. At a trade show in New Orleans, he tested the coffee served each morning and found it contained very little caffeine. And this month, Cody studied the chemical composition of onions and garlic. ("It really stunk in here," he said.)

But these days, the most important sample is sitting in a vial atop the testing machine, which has a mind-numbing name: the AccuTOF-DART time-of-flight mass spectrometer with open air ionization.

The vial contains powdered milk, with melamine added. Melamine is a toxic compound used to make polymers. If ingested, it causes kidney damage. It has been illegally used as supplement in pet food and dairy products in China to boost protein counts. Last year, tainted pet food from China killed thousands of cats and dogs in the United States. More recently, melamine has turned up in powdered milk sold in China, like the milk in the vial Cody and his colleague, Dr. John Dane, were testing earlier this month.

The machine works by measuring the molecular weights of each component in a substance. JEOL, founded in 1948, said the Food and Drug Administration used AccuTOF-DART to determine that melamine - not rat poison, as originally suspected - caused last year's scare.

The AccuTOF-DART delivers almost immediate results, in contrast with older methods, which require a vacuum setup and separate testing of individual components.

Finding melamine is just the latest application for the system, which Cody and other JEOL scientists launched in 2005. It has become a popular tool for law enforcement officials. For instance, the FBI has used it to analyze everything from drug samples to fibers from crime scenes.

"These guys collect white powders all the time, and they have a whole list of things they need to go through when they test them," Dane said of law enforcement agencies. The AccuTOF-DART "really lets them narrow it down to two or three possible components."

The applications for police work are so obvious that, shortly after JEOL began marketing its machine, producers from the hit CBS television crime show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" contacted the company. Since then, the machine has been featured in several episodes.

"CSI has a reputation for instant analysis, and this is about as close as you can get to instant analysis," Cody said.

The machine is also a hit with pharmaceutical companies, which can use it in quality control. For example, Cody and his team have tested counterfeit drugs, and were surprised to learn that counterfeit Cialis tablets contained large quantities of Viagra, a competing erectile dysfunction treatment. And when they tested counterfeit anti-malaria medications used in Southeast Asia, they were able to determine there were no active chemicals in the pricey pills.

Currently, the machine is not being used to test for melamine, but Cody foresees a time when it may be used by food importers.

The privately held company, which has 300 employees, is optimistic that the system will eventually be used by the FDA after its success in pinpointing what was causing pets to die.

"When the pet food scare originally started, they didn't know melamine was causing it. They just knew pets were dying," Cody said. "This changed that."