At age 60, C. Kumar N. Patel had a resume of accomplishments few scientists could match.
In a span of four decades, Patel invented the carbon dioxide laser, which revolutionized manufacturing and surgical procedures, obtained 38 patents and ran the physics and engineering departments at Bell Labs, a premier research operation historically attached to AT&T.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, January 27, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 46 words Type of Material: Correction
Harvey Mudd College: An article in Monday's Business section about the inventor of the carbon dioxide laser, C. Kumar N. Patel, gave the wrong location for the school where many employees of his company, Pranalytica Inc., recently graduated. Harvey Mudd College is in Claremont, not Pomona.
In 1996, Patel, then vice chancellor for research at UCLA, reached the pinnacle of his career when he was honored for his "revolutionary achievements" by President Clinton.
Yet at a time when others would have retired and rested on their laurels, Patel left the relative comfort of academia, tapped his life savings and started a tiny technology company in Santa Monica that had no product or market.
"I had a midlife crisis at 60," Patel said with a laugh as he roamed a somewhat run-down office building that once housed an insurance firm but now is filled with scientific equipment. It didn't make his wife happy, but "everybody has to find a way by which they can do what they've wanted to do for many years."
After trying times when Patel had to pull out money from his savings to pay employees, the company, which makes laser devices, broke even and last year generated $6 million in revenue.
Patel believes that could double in 18 months. The company is targeting new markets that he acknowledges he could not have imagined when he started it in 2000.
The company, Pranalytica Inc., started as a developer of sensors for analyzing human breath for disease, but is now leading the quest to make small lasers that can knock down antiaircraft missiles. The company's name comes from the Sanskrit word for "breath."
"One thing I learned is that a small company has to be very agile with respect to market opportunities," said Patel, now 70. "You can't create new science all of a sudden, but you can fill in the gaps in terms of where the needs are."
Patel figured his initial idea of developing and marketing sensors that could detect potential diseases in the breath would be particularly useful for hospitals.
But with limited resources, Patel said he could not commercialize the technology in a way that could make it more available and affordable.
Having hit a barrier typically encountered by start-ups, he shifted the focus of the technology's application to detecting minute pollutants in fabricating semiconductors. But that business was waylaid by the dot-com bust, which dried up venture capital.
