Why Grass is Green?

Ever since he was an Ohio farm boy studying textbooks as he plowed, Charles Franklin Kettering has wondered why grass is green. When the invention of motorcar self-starters and the vice-presidency of General Motors made him a millionaire, he gave $577,000 to Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio, to find out. Last week he thought he almost knew the answer. Full of premonitions he took the scholar who was doing the investigating for him to Cleveland to address the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Paul Wilhelm Karl Rothemund explained that grass is green because out of water and the chemicals of earth it, like all plants, manufactures a colorless substance called proto-chlorophyll. Proto-chlorophyll accumulates in certain cells of leaves called chloroplasts where it comes in contact with carbon dioxide in the air. When the sun is shining a molecule of proto-chlorophyll, stimulated by an atom of magnesium which holds it together, absorbs four quanta of energy from a sunbeam. The extra energy enables the proto-chlorophyll to attract carbon dioxide, kick off the oxygen which it does not require, absorb the carbon. At that instant the colorless proto-chlorophyll becomes chlorophyll and makes the grass green.

Dr. Rothemund concluded that this was the process of photosynthesis and chlorophyll genesis after he raised an acre of colorless corn in the pitch-dark cellar of the big laboratory building which Antioch College built with Mr. Kettering's money. The extract of white corn leaves turned green when Dr. Rothemund put it in jars of carbon dioxide.

The National Academicians ceased wondering at young Dr. Rothemund's air of authority when they learned that Mr. Kettering had taken him away from Professor Hans Fischer of Munich, Nobel Laureate and supreme authority on the coloring material of leaves and blood. Professor Fischer and Dr. Rothemund are racing neck & neck to make chlorophyll artificially. Just behind them, handicapped by being Harvard University's president, is Chemist James Bryant Conant. "One of us will make the material within a year," said Dr. Rothemund last week.

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