Feverish Activity

Bio-Medical Sciences, Inc., was founded five years ago by a man who was then only 21, and it has never earned a profit or sold a single product. Yet some major financiers have invested $30 million in the company. Among them, Allstate Insurance has put up $3,000,000, Prudential Insurance $2,000,000, the Rockefeller family $1,560,000 and a Yale University endowment fund $1,000,000. Merrill Lynch co-managed a $25 million private placement for the firm in September. The company's highly speculative stock, issued at $10 a share in 1969, was selling last week at 84 1/2 over the counter, giving Bio-Medical a total market value of more than $62 million.

Why have so many invested so much in Bio-Medical? The company is working on a family of disposable medical instruments that may offer some advantages in convenience, cost and sanitation over products now available. Among other things, Bio-Medical has developed a throwaway version of the simplest and most frequently used medical instrument: the thermometer.

Unlike the reusable (and breakable) glass thermometer, the new product looks something like a Band-Aid. It is a short, thin strip of plastic-coated aluminum printed with a series of numbers from 96DEG to 104DEG. Next to every number is a row of five small dots representing gradations of two-tenths of a degree, and each dot contains a different chemical formulation, which reacts and turns blue at a precise temperature. When placed in the mouth for 30 seconds, v. three minutes for a conventional thermometer, the device shows a progression of blue dots until the person's temperature is reached (see cut). The thermometers come in plastic packs of ten or 20, and they are chemically activated only after being pulled through rollers inside the dispenser.

Some 30 million glass thermometers now are sold each year in the U.S., and prices usually range from $1.50 to $2; Bio-Medical spokesmen say that the plastic thermometers will cost less than a dime each. Since they can be used only once, the company indicated in a prospectus filed with the SEC that distributors expect to sell around 1,000,000 thermometers daily.

Johnson & Johnson has contracted to market the product in the U.S., and Sweden's drugmaking AB Astra has signed up to sell it in Scandinavia. J. & J. will begin a test-marketing program in 1973. Bio-Medical has built a pilot plant in Fairfield, N.J., to make the thermometers and has applied for patents in more than 30 countries.

The disposable thermometer was developed by Chairman Berel Weinstein, now 26. The son of a cardiologist, he graduated only six years ago from Brooklyn College. Weinstein started the company with the help of a former W.E. Hutton & Co. stockbroker, a Manhattan attorney and a printing-company executive. All the money that has been invested in Bio-Medical has gone to developing the thermometer and other possible products. Weinstein figures that the time-temperature dots may also be used to indicate spoilage in packaged foods. For Weinstein, who lives quietly with his wife in Sparta, N.J., the venture has already paid nicely. He owns 21% of the company's stock, and his holdings have a paper value of $13.3 million.

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