Alumnus Profile: Paul T. Wegener (BS '71)

Paul T. Wegener (BS '71) is dedicated to transforming ideas into groundbreaking innovations. His career spans environmental engineering and pharmaceuticals, with ventures that range from pioneering an ocean wave energy conversion device to exploring green tea extract as a treatment for viral infections. Despite claiming to be retired, Wegener continues to analyze data sets and clinical trials—driven by his passion for invention—and he welcomes discussion and input from anyone interested in his work.

ENGenuity spoke with Wegener to discuss his diverse career and current projects, which have taken him from the waters of Baltimore Harbor to the shores of Nova Scotia, and even to a life-altering meeting at LAX. In our interview, Wegener reflects on how his Caltech education empowered him to turn scientific discoveries into practical products and how his spiritual journey has guided him along the way.

ENGenuity: How would you describe your professional contributions, and what are you currently working on?

Paul T. Wegener: My professional contributions have to do with trying to get wild ideas commercialized. I am currently still working on two ideas, even though I am supposed to be retired. One is a treatment for COVID or any other viral infection in the lung using inhaled green tea extract. The proof of principle trial done by a colleague in Italy during the COVID epidemic succeeded. The other thing I am working on is ocean wave energy conversion—a graveyard of inventors. Only one wave energy device has succeeded in 200 years, but other than that, every other device has sunk or otherwise failed, despite a lot of money being spent.

I am working on the Waveberg, which takes its name from the inventor, John Berg—I am looking for a better name, suggestions are welcome. John started working on it in the 1960s and 1970s in San Francisco. I met him in 1992 in Nova Scotia; he had built several models there. One model, three meters long, was moored in St. Margarets Bay for 14 months and it worked. It went through several storms; we have video of it being thrown around by waves three or four times the size of the device. I have improved his design since then, but the improvements are still patentable, so I can't talk about it in a detailed sense. The idea is quite simple. It's a main float with arms that stick out, and there are floats at the end of the arms. You can find a video demo on YouTube. The definition of a wave energy device is a device with two masses that move differently when they are activated by waves, and then you must create a mechanical linkage between the two masses to extract the energy. The device I am working on has three masses—the three arms—and the energy is extracted by pumping water. That pressurized water is piped to shore, and you get what is called ocean hydro. You then extract the energy from that pressurized water to make electricity or desalinated water.

ENGenuity: What inspired you to get into environmental engineering?

Wegener: I arrived at Caltech in 1967 after a year at Reed College. I just missed Feynman's lectures, but they were still teaching from his book, and he was still there. I had always wanted to be an ecologist, but unfortunately, ecology is not really a viable profession. But in terms of education, you have to be a generalist to be a good ecologist. I took professional level geology as a senior at Caltech, and then I had a great seminar after that with a wonderful teacher. That teacher asked me what I was going to do after graduation, and I had not really figured that out. He said he had a friend back east who had a new program, and that was the new environmental engineering graduate program at Johns Hopkins. There was a famous teacher there, M. Gordon (Reds) Wolman, and he was running an interdisciplinary training program. I thrived there.

My master's thesis was on oil pollution in Baltimore harbor—where was the pollution coming from? It turned out it was coming from the leaky engines of cars and trucks. Nobody had noticed that before. I originally thought it was around a million gallons of oil coming into the harbor. Then, after I left school, somebody checked the sediments and they found out there was actually ten million gallons of oil washing into the harbor every year.

ENGenuity: What led you to start Epitome Pharmaceuticals? That seems very different than environmental engineering.

Wegener: It's completely different. What you learn at Caltech is how to do research, how to ask questions, and how to transcend ordinary boundaries. There were no jobs available in environmental engineering when I got my master's degree. I had to drive a cab for a while. By the time I got back to doing anything with science, which was 12 years later, I was out of date scientifically. I worked with a start-up for four years, and then I went out on my own.

In the pharmaceutical business, you have a good chance that somebody is going to want your product. I found inventors, in particular, Dr. Yukihiko Hara, who is the modern father of medicinal green tea as we know it. I spent four hours with him in his hotel room at LAX—he was flying back to Japan the next day—and he showed me what he was working on. I thought it was a good idea. He agreed to give me one of his products to develop. Nobody else was going to do anything with it. All the pharmaceutical companies he had approached rejected green tea because they thought couldn't make any medicine from it. Well, you can. So, I did.

I found the right people, listened to them, submitted a Pre-IND [Pre-Investigational New Drug Application] at the FDA and it was accepted. This was in 1994, when the new botanical guidelines came out. U.S. senators were angry that the FDA wasn't paying attention to dietary supplements, which were making medical claims without providing much proof. The supplements couldn't legally claim they could cure a disease, and therefore, they could not be classified as medicines, which was the purview of the FDA. We came in with proof that we could cure a disease, a humble disease, genital warts, which Dr. Hara's colleagues had done in China. They made an ointment with his concentrated green tea extract and people put it on their genital warts in a clinical trial, and it worked.

ENGenuity: How did your work with green tea extract become entwined with a treatment for COVID?

Wegener: Saverio Bettuzzi, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Parma in Italy, has been studying green tea extracts for many years. The COVID pandemic was fierce in Italy, and the hospitals were completely swamped. Anybody with a positive test for COVID was treated at home until they were so sick they had to go to the hospital. Professor Bettuzzi and colleagues treated ten patients with inhaled green tea extract using a nebulizer, which creates a mist of the medicine which the patient breathes in. Those people recovered in an average of nine days and none of them recovered in anything longer than 15 days. That was a much faster recovery than the standard of care there.

Green tea is sticky, molecularly speaking. It latches on to a lot of different molecules. Unfortunately, if you take pills of green tea, hardly any of it gets into your system. When you inhale green tea extract in a nebulizer, you get fairly high concentrations in the lung, and it was able to knock down the infection for those people in Italy, even the older patients with lung damage shown by CT.

ENGenuity: How has your Caltech education influenced you?

Wegener: The professors were very engaging and encouraging. If you asked a question, they were delighted. It was fun to have discussions and a curiosity about nature; everyone shares that at Caltech. One of the great things about being at Caltech is it is humbling. There are so many people who are so much smarter than you are. But it turns out that it is a lot of fun to talk to really smart people, and if you kind of understand what they are talking about, they appreciate it. That was my skill, being able to talk to really smart people, learn what they had found, and translate that into a practical product. That's what I've been doing for 40 years.

ENGenuity: Is there a project that you are most proud of in your career?

Wegener: In graduate school in Baltimore, I got more and more interested in discovering the nature of human life. All my vague concepts of what I was going to do with myself were getting tattered. I was 22 years old and didn't know what life was about or where I could be helpful. Then I had a breakthrough. I went on a walkabout in the city of Baltimore for about three weeks. I didn't bother to eat; I was just on the street walking around. I came back from that, but I was still a hot mess. I ended up going to Vermont where I met my Buddhism teacher, Chögyam Trungpa. He was one of the great teachers at the time and he is still referenced as being the guy who made the big breakthrough in the west. He told me: "There's nothing wrong with you. Just sit and practice meditation." So, I did that. I served him for 14 years. That was the most important part of my life. I helped to build meditation centers, and I'm still contributing as best I can.

The nature of reality is illusory. Leonard Cohen sang: "It's coming from the feeling that it ain't exactly real, or it's real, but it ain't exactly there." That's from his song, "Democracy." He was also a Buddhist practitioner and spent years serving a Zen teacher near Mt. Baldy. The question is: who are we and what are we doing here? The Buddha asked that question 2,500 years ago and he found answers, and some people listen to those answers today and go, "hmm, that makes sense." It's the same intelligence that is required to do well at Caltech or any other place where you're going to think about a problem. You have to have a personal, subjective connection to the issue. Otherwise, nothing is going to happen.

ENGenuity: What advice would you give to recent Caltech alumni?

Wegener: If you are having a hard time, that is normal. There is no yellow brick road. There is no Oz.

ENGenuity: What is your favorite story?

Wegener: A favorite book of mine that I have read several times over the years is Cosmicomics written in 1965 by Italo Calvino. It is a goof on what we were doing between the Big Bang and today. He plays with the assumption that the mind is durable and beginningless, the basic Buddhist hypothesis.

ENGenuity: What is your favorite destination?

Wegener: Halifax, Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia is a place that time forgot. They are always about 10 or 15 years behind culture, not in terms of songs or the superficial stuff. As a society, they are able to tame the aggression that we often see between people in families and jobs. They are kind and gentle. Not that everything is perfect there, but that's where I like to be.

ENGenuity: What keeps you up at night?

Wegener: The main one is climate change. I gave up my car 25 years ago; this privilege is destroying civilization. Ocean wave energy comes out of that; three percent of petroleum is used to generate electricity on islands. I'm currently analyzing the results of a trial that we did with a scale model of the Waveberg in a wave tank. The question is: how much energy was it making and what were the variables that determined that energy? I have been working on this for years.

ENGenuity: What gets you up in the morning?

Wegener: I want to bring this [wave energy conversion device] to reality. I have a wonderful life. I have these projects and I'm still motivated to make them a reality.