Part 3 of 3
The Patent Examiner Who Questioned Acemannan – and Evenutally Wanted In
There is a name on these patents that we haven’t talked much about.
And that’s understandable.
When you look at a patent, your eyes naturally go to the inventors.
Bill McAnalley.
Robert Carpenter.
Harley Reginald McDaniel.
These are the scientists associated with the discovery, the experimentation, and the claims being made about Acemannan. And we have already mentioned that these patents were like scientific studies on steroids.
But somewhere else on that document—in the kind of small print most of us would never stop to read—is another name: And you know what that means? That means we dig deeper and reach wider.
On both patent documents is the Primary Examiner: John W. Rollins.
At first glance, Rollins almost disappears from the machinery of the patent system.
He’s not listed among the inventors.
He’s not the scientist trying to convince the Patent Office that something important has been discovered.
He’s the government examiner.
The institutional checkpoint.
The bio-technical gatekeeper.
The man on the other side of the desk.
And that distinction matters.
Because the inventors had something they wanted recognized, Rollins was one of the people whose professional responsibility was to scrutinize what was being presented.
His job was not to become excited about Acemannan.
His job was to examine.
To question.
To compare.
To evaluate the claims against what was already known.
To determine whether the invention met the requirements for patent protection.
In other words, he wasn’t there to promote the case. He was there to test the case.
And that makes John Rollins one of the more fascinating characters in this story. The original framing we developed called him “the least likely salesman in the story.”
Because eventually—that is exactly where this story is going.
But not yet.
HE WASN’T JUST PUSHING PAPER
It would be easy to imagine Rollins as a government bureaucrat sitting behind a desk, moving paperwork from one pile to another.
That picture would be wrong.
Rollins tells us that he worked for the United States Patent and Trademark Office for more than twenty years. He describes his specialty there as “plant extracts of undefined chemical constitution.”
That was the government language he had given himself to
The inventors knew they were extracting something from plants, and they knew the material was producing some kind of biological effect—even when they still were painting the big picture in the patent application for others to understand.
So think about who was sitting on the other side of the desk.
This wasn’t simply someone processing forms.
This was a trained biologist working as a biotechnology patent examiner, He had two masters degrees and a Phd. He would be encountering inventions involving plants, extracts, biological activity, nutrition, and emerging technologies. He was being paid to be skeptical.
And then, sometime in the mid-1980s, something unusual came across his desk.
Rollins remembers it as a “big thick application” from a research group in Texas.
The researchers were making a remarkable claim.
They believed they had identified the active ingredient in aloe vera gel.
Now remember what we’ve already learned in this series.
Aloe itself wasn’t new. People had been using aloe for generations. It is not an exaggeration to say for millennia.
What was different was the proposition that researchers could move beyond simply saying:
“Aloe seems to do something.”
They were attempting, instead, to identify what exactly within aloe was responsible for important biological activity.
And the material at the center of that investigation was a complex carbohydrate—a polysaccharide that came to be known as Acemannan.
That is where Rollins’s story becomes interesting.
Because he didn’t immediately buy it.
ROLLINS THE SKEPTIC
Listen carefully to how Rollins describes his own initial reaction.
Rolllins: My initial reactions took place while I was working at the US Patent and Trademark Office as a biotech biotech patent examiner.
Now this occurred in the nineteen eighties, mid nineteen eighties, when I was examining a series of applications from an inventor that was claiming that he had been able to, isolate a particular compound from allo and that this compound happens to be a saccharide or a sugar, a complex sugar, that supports the immune system and that supports cell to cell communication. Now the the utilities, that is the use of the product, didn’t bother me so much, but I was really skeptical.
That section is especially valuable because Rollins isn’t remembering himself as someone predisposed to believe the claims. He explicitly says the proposed uses did not bother him as much as the underlying proposition did, that this was a sugar and the claims being made for sugars ran against conventional thinking of the time. That may be one of the most important things John Rollins contributes to our story.
He tells us that he was skeptical.
And not because he was unfamiliar with the subject.
Precisely the opposite.
His skepticism arose from what he understood the prevailing science to say at the time.
The idea that a complex carbohydrate could participate in immune support and cell-to-cell communication was, in his words, “going against the grain.”
He describes it as 180 degrees away from the thinking of the traditional carbohydrate chemist.
That gives us a very different picture from the one we started with.
The tiny name on the patent is becoming a person.
And the government examiner is becoming something else: An informed professional skeptic confronting an idea that didn’t comfortably fit the scientific expectations he brought to the desk.
But skepticism is only valuable when it is willing to follow the evidence wherever the evidence leads.
And something began happening to John Rollins.
“A GOOSE-PIMPLE-RAISING EXPERIENCE”
Rollins says that eventually there was a face-to-face interview with the inventor.
And as he began to understand the technology better, he describes the experience in language you wouldn’t expect from a patent examiner:
“It was a goose-pimple-raising experience for me.”
Think about that transition.
He hasn’t become a salesman.
He hasn’t joined the company.
He hasn’t abandoned his professional responsibilities.
He’s still sitting on the other side of the desk.
But the skeptic has become intrigued.
And in his longer account, Rollins describes another moment when the significance of what he was examining began to change.
He says: “It became now more than academic. It became more than part of my job.”
Why? Because Acemannan was about to leave the patent file and enter his home.
WHEN THE SCIENCE BECAME PERSONAL
At the time, Rollins says his wife was suffering from a serious autoimmune condition.
As he describes it, her immune system was attacking her own tissues.
And while examining the application, he encountered the proposition that this aloe-derived material could support immune function.
Suddenly, the technology wasn’t merely interesting. It was personally relevant.
Rollins says he contacted the inventor, received some prototype material, and his wife began using it. He reports that she began to feel better.
We are not turning Rollins’s personal account into a clinical trial.
And we are not saying the product cured his wife’s autoimmune disease.
Rollins doesn’t establish that.
What we can say is exactly what makes this story worth telling:
The professional examiner became personally interested enough in what he had examined to obtain the material for his own family.
The distance between the two sides of the desk was getting smaller.
And yet, something rather remarkable happened next.
Rollins did not simply become a distributor.
In fact, he couldn’t.
Conflict of interest.
He says he sought permission from his supervisors to obtain the products because of his wife’s situation. Permission was granted for him to sign up to purchase the products at wholesale.
But there was an important restriction:
He could not market them.
So he didn’t.
For years, Rollins says, he and his wife would travel to Dallas and attend company conventions simply because they wanted to learn more about the science.
I want you to appreciate the unusual picture this creates.
Here is a government patent professional who had originally encountered this world from the position of evaluator and skeptic.
He had become sufficiently interested to use the products personally.
Sufficiently interested to travel to conventions to continue learning.
But professionally constrained from becoming part of the marketing organization.
The examiner could become a consumer.
He could become a student.
But he could not become a marketer.
Not yet.
THE PATENT EXAMINER RETIRES
And then comes the final turn in the story.
Years pass.
And eventually John Rollins retires from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Now listen to what happens next in his own words.
Rollins: I had retired from the patent office.
I’m ready to go to work now.
Folks, these products have a lot of science behind them, but I just want you to understand that the products are supported by a tremendous amount of science.
And here I am, I’m a trained biologist myself, so I I’m supposed to know this stuff.
As we began to come to grips with what he had, it dawned on me that he really was on to something.
Here are products that he had developed that can really support normal physiology.
And of course, I was particularly interested in the support of the immune system.
A product that supports the immune system, targets the immune system, to make sure that the immune system is structurally sound and functionally sound, and that’s very important.
And the aloe helps the body to be able to recognize these infectious agents, the virus, because the cells have to communicate, and that includes our immune system.
So when the communication is right, our bodies can do and function the way it needs to function.
When the immune system has all that it needs to support its structure, its function, and anything else that it needs, we find in this immune support product.
And there it is.
The transformation is complete.
The name in the fine print became the man who wanted in.
Not because someone stopped him on the street.
Not because he encountered a clever advertisement.
Not because he attended an opportunity meeting knowing nothing about the technology.
His relationship with this science began on the other side of the desk.
He encountered it professionally.
He questioned it.
He examined it.
He watched its development.
He became personally interested in it.
He used products associated with it.
He continued following the science.
And when the professional restriction that prevented him from marketing was finally gone, Rollins tells us plainly:
“I’m ready to go to work now.”
That is an extraordinary arc.
THE PERSON WE ALMOST MISSED
Go back now and look at the patent again.
Primary Examiner: John W. Rollins.
Funny how different those words look now.
At the beginning of this episode, he was almost invisible.
A name in the fine print.
A bio-technical gatekeeper.
The man on the other side of the desk.
But perhaps the most interesting person appearing on these patents is the person who didn’t invent anything.
Because John Rollins gives us something McAnalley, Carpenter, and McDaniel cannot give us.
They were the people advancing the invention.
Rollins encountered it from the outside.
He was the evaluator who had to be persuaded.
And according to his own account, he didn’t begin as an easy convert.
He began skeptical.
Then intrigued.
Then impressed.
Then personally invested.
And ultimately, after retirement, willing to attach his own time, reputation, and effort to marketing products connected to technology he had first encountered professionally.
That’s why I don’t want John Rollins to remain a tiny name at the bottom of a patent.
And his professional background doesn’t relieve us of our responsibility to examine the underlying science for ourselves. This very website is shortcut to that science.
But that isn’t what makes his story significant.
The man who sat on the other side of the desk decided he wanted to help take the technology into the marketplace.
He had every reason to encounter Acemannan professionally and keep it at arm’s length. Instead, years later, it became personal.
And maybe that is the reason John W. Rollins deserves more than the fine print.
Because when the person whose job was to scrutinize the invention eventually becomes one of the people most eager to tell the Acemannan story—I think his unique story becomes worth hearing, too.
I hope you will always be careful to maintain good works to meet urgent needs and become heroes to your generation.