Faculty Profiles
Neal Siegel
Neal Siegel is chief scientist for Sword Diagnostics, a
Chicago area biotechnology company. He worked in the diagnostics
division of Abbott Laboratories for 19 years and holds six
foreign and U.S. patents related to blood separation technologies.
Siegel, who earned a PhD in biochemistry, lives on an 11-acre
farm in Morris, Illinois, where he tends to 10 donkeys, 4
horses, and roosters Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Q: What is quality?
NS: It means making sure that things work correctly the
first time and every time you use them. How do you know that
the first aspirin in the bottle - or the last - is
safe? How do you know a beverage is safe to drink? It's
because of safeguards put into place by industry and regulated
by the FDA.
Q: Is the MQARS program the first of its kind?
NS: Engineers have studied quality, but not life scientists.
Because of the variability of biological components, quality
in the life sciences is different from quality in engineering.
Even the statistical methods they use may be different: linear
for engineering, nonlinear for biology.
Q: How did this program get started?
NS: I taught an undergraduate course, Quality in Science,
in Northwestern's chemistry department for five years.
Faculty, grad students, and post-docs heard about it and
asked what they needed to know to work in industry. This
program fills a critical need, and SCS deserves accolades
for breaking ground with it.
Q: What's it like to deal with the FDA?
NS: I have a great deal of respect for the FDA. The Food,
Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 grew out of a therapeutic
disaster: more than 100 people, most of them children, died
after taking an untested sulfa wonder drug that used a toxic
chemical as a solvent. That couldn't happen today,
and although our system may not be perfect, we have controls
in place to respond rapidly to problems and fix them.
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