Baby Blue Chips: bioCOOL Technologies LLC

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By Marti Childs and Jeff March

Research that NASA once funded for applications in outer space and below ground in mining rescues has led to a Sacramento company taking the technology in far different directions.
    The company, bioCOOL Technologies LLC, has designed gear to help protect U.S. military forces from the scorching heat in Iraq. It simultaneously is developing medical technology shown to be effective in treating neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis, stroke, head trauma and other conditions, using “therapeutic hypothermia,” or intentionally induced subnormal temperatures.
    The founder, president and driving force behind bioCOOL is Bill Elkins, an industrial designer who retired a few years ago but found he couldn’t sit still. He has been in perpetual motion since his days as a U.S. fighter pilot during the Korean War. Elkins planned to spend his civilian career designing controls and displays for fighter aircraft. But the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in October 1957 irrevocably altered his career path.
    His first assignment in the nascent Project Mercury space-flight program was to develop an astronaut-
restraint couch for use during launch and reentry. Elkins voluntarily tested the gravitational-force resistance of his design in a centrifuge.
    “I withstood 16.5 Gs in the couch, which is still a standing record,” he says. That restraint couch was awarded the first of more than two dozen patents for Elkins. During the early portion of his career with Litton Industries and AiResearch in Southern California through the 1960s, he designed pressure- and temperature-regulating flight uniforms for military pilots and astronauts in the Mercury and Apollo programs.
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