Chemists at New Orleans

Only 275 of the more than 19,000 members of the American Chemical Society are out of work, President Laurence V. Redman assured that body when it met in New Orleans last week. The ratio of one unemployed out of 70 seemed to him an excellent professional record. On the other hand Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, published by the Society, in the issue which printed the convention program, carried seven want-ad offers of situations against 65 applications by members--nine chemists for every offered job. Dr. Redman thinks the Depression beneficial. Said he: "When business is good, research is hampered and all hands are engaged in turning out materials. Yet the only way man ever made quick money was through research. Depression in southern Europe in the 15th Century caused the chartering of Columbus' expedition. . . ." As usufructs of Depression he counted cellophane, colored metals, non-rusting metals, cancer investigations. The harvest also included: Selenium for Cancer? Years ago investigators tried selenium as a treatment for cancer. It destroyed cancers and the people who had them, was discarded. At the University of Illinois Professor Rosalie Mary Parr* mixed sodium selenite, calcium germanate, sodium chloride (table salt) and 1,000 parts of water. Dr. Clarence Sylvester Bucher, physician & surgeon, injected the solution into the muscles of several persons having cancers and then exposed the patients to x-rays. Dr. Ruth Scovell Funk, bacteriologist, studied the tissues. The cancers seemed to heal. Supposition is that the selenium atoms acted as reflectors of x-rays, thus giving cancer cells a double bombardment of direct and indirect rays. (In London last week Sir Arthur Keith, great anthropologist and surgeon, qualified a report that a young doctor researching on the roof of the Royal College of Surgeons had found a cure for cancer. Said Sir Arthur: "The truth is, the young experimenter has got hold of something big toward the control of its growth. It is true that he is working with a parathyroid extract. It means that in his experiments on animals he can develop or retard growth as he wishes. But whether this discovery will ultimately lead to control of malignant growth remains to be seen.") Slow Anesthetic, Two Cincinnatians, Theodore Harold Rider and Eugene Wiley Scott, presented a new local anesthetic which they claim is stronger than novocaine or cocaine and can replace those drugs. It is not habit-forming, its effect wears off slowly. The patient is "more comfortable after operation than is usually the case." The anesthetic's full name is hydrochloride of piperidinopropanediol diphenylurethane, abbreviated to diothane. Castor Oil Detoxifyer. Castor oil contains a specific poison called ricin, analogous to the toxins of certain bacteria. By treating sodium ricinoleate, a derivative of castor oil, Dr. Rider obtained a substance called soricin which counteracts the ill effects of the toxins of diphtheria and lockjaw. It also cancels the poisons of snake venom. Soricin, Dr. Rider thinks, may have value in immunization.

Food Industry "needs men trained for it, men and women with training in chemical engineering, bacteriology, accounting, economics of marketing, and possibly agriculture. Surely the food industries as a whole are more important than the dairy products industry alone, yet there are 60 or more universities or colleges training young men and women for the dairy products industries and only three or four offering training in the larger field of endeavor. Thus the canning industry must, in general, recruit its personnel from other fields; the same is true of the dehydrated and frozen food, refrigeration, fermentation and other industrial lines. Practically the only training now given in foods in this country is in departments of home economics. I believe that more adequate educational and training opportunities should be available for men entering the food industries; such opportunities are now sadly wanting.'' -- Professor Carl Raymond Fetters, Massachusetts Agricultural College. But the dairy industry must not be slighted, declared J. H. Nair of the Merrell-Soule Co., Syracuse, N. Y. It "constitutes the largest single industry in the country, supplying nearly one-half of the annual consumption of foodstuffs." It must solve problems of preservation, needs experts. Frozen Foods. The quick freezing of foods is becoming "America's fastest-growing industry," declared Clarence Birdseye and Gerald A. Fitzgerald of Gloucester, Mass. More than 100 food products are now frozen for market. Food, moving on endless belts, is swiftly turned to ice at 25DEG to 30DEG below zero Fahrenheit. There are mobile freezing machines which may be moved into truck gardens, orchards and berry patches. Among many "quick-freezing" problems are how to preserve taste, appearance and nutrition values upon defrosting. Donald Kiteley Tressler and William T. Murray of Gloucester have been trying to determine just how long to age beef in order to make a tender quick-frozen meat. Sugared Plaster-- The desperate sugar industry with 2,105,000 long tons overproduction asked Mellon Institute to find new uses for sugar. Result: Gerald Judy Cox and John Metschl resurrected and perfected an ancient masonic formula for strengthening mortar with syrup. To every 100 Ib. of quicklime in a lime-sand mortar mix they add 6 Ib. sugar. The sugared mortar is 60% stronger than ordinary mortar. Sugar last week sold at 4 1/2-c- per Ib. wholesale. The two sugar investigators also perfected commercial methods of making citric and oxalic acids from cane sugar. They have also made sucrose octa-acetate and sucrose benzoate, which are valuable in certain kinds of lacquers and adhesives and in the manufacture of paper. Sluggish Gasoline. There is a gasoline "which under ordinary conditions will burn only with a wick as kerosene does, but which in spite of this is satisfactory in tractors and special automobile engines in warm climates in summer," observed Robert Thompson Haslam, vice president of Standard Oil Development Co. He foresees industrial alcohol made from waste refinery gases. One of the largest current uses for these gases is in the manufacture of hydrogen. Cottonseed Gasoline. Cottonseed makes good hog and cow food and palatable cooking oil. If the oil is fed into a metal coil at 900DEG F. and 150 Ib. per sq. in. pressure, it breaks down into gasoline. Cottonseed gasoline costs 35-c- to 40-c- a gallon, said Gustav Egloff of Chicago, too high for all but a few districts in the U. S., but not too high for countries a long distance from gasoline sources. Other breakdown products of cottonseed oil include Diesel engine oil, coke, gases, water. Certain of the gases can be converted into alcohol, anti-freeze materials. Museums. No community of more than 50,000 in the U. S., Canada or Great Britain lacks a museum of some kind. The U. S. has about 1400 museums of which 300 are devoted to Science and Industry. U. S. museums are intended to attract the general public and educate children, whereas the British type is primarily a specialist's collection. "Particularly fine organizations" are located at Brooklyn, Buffalo, Charleston, Chicago, Erie, Newark, Philadelphia, Rochester, Trenton. Trenton's Museum loans live animals to children. Museums in Cleveland and St. Louis and the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan lead in distributing their items among the schools. The Philadelphia Commercial Museum tries to interest foreign and domestic buyers of Philadelphia products.--Aida M. Doyle, U. S. National Museum, Washington. Brightest Young Man picked by the American Chemical Society this year is Dr. Oscar Knefler Rice, 29, Harvard instructor of chemistry. Like his friend Professor Linus Carl Pauling of California Institute of Technology, chosen last year as U. S. Chemistry's brightest. Dr. Rice, who also studied at Caltech, is prodigious in his application of physical theories to chemical problems. His special work has been interpreting reactions between gases by means of quantum mechanics. He has also used modern theories of statistics to describe metals and electro-capillarity. The past year his researches have been devoted to finding out what happens to the energy contained in molecules of gases when the molecules break up. His present program is to determine the process by which molecular energy is transferred back & forth between molecules in a heated gas.

Bright young Instructor Rice spends most of his time in Harvard's Edward Mallinckrodt Chemical Laboratory, refreshes himself with tennis, squash, ping pong. When notice of Dr. Rice's kudos came to him last week, it came in a telegraph envelope marked portentously "Do not 'phone." He received it on the stoop of his Cambridge boarding house, commented: "Very unexpected. I thought it a death message."

*No kin to the late Professor Samuel Wilson Parr who was onetime (1928) president of the American Chemical Society.

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