Men & Molecules

Friedrich Bergius, though he is one of Germany's most brilliant chemists, may some day be the most bitterly hated by that country's common people. He is a specialist in those technologies to which necessity is not only mother but sedulous nurse. Vivid in the German mind is a hateful memory of the Ersatz (substitute) foods consumed in great quantities during and after the War. If natural food again becomes scarce in Germany, Chemist Bergius will doubtless be in charge of producing Ersatz food for empty German stomachs. Lately he has worked out on a mass-production basis the manufacture of edible substances from wood.

In 1914 young Bergius conceived the idea of making motor fuel from coal by hydrogenation under high heat and heavy pressure. Over the following two decades he and other chemists in Germany, Britain and Canada converted the idea into an industrial fact. Finely powdered coal is made into a paste by mixing with tar or a tar derivative, the mixture fed into a heavy steel cylinder. At 840DEG F, hydrogen gas is brought in under 3,700 Ib. per sq. in. pressure. The hydrogen combines with the carbon or carbon compounds in the coal.

Then light-molecule hydrocarbons like gasoline can be distilled off, as in the some-what similar process of "cracking" petro- leum. Germany produced about 300,000 tons of motor fuel by coal-hydrogenation last year; 500.000 tons is a likely figure for this year. Last year England's Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. completed a hydrogenation plant of 150,000 tons annual capacity. In the U. S., which produces oceans of oil, the commercial process has not got under way.

Last week Dr. Bergius, bald and 52, was spotlighted in Pittsburgh at the convention of the American Chemical Society.

As an example of how economic necessity may point the way to technological research, he neatly remarked that while Germany is trying to turn "waste products of industry into food, the U. S. is trying to divert food to industrial uses (example: Henry Ford compressing soybean meal into automobile parts). The German made a speech on "Problems of Industrial Pioneer Work" in which he told how under modern conditions long years and much money may be required for a new process to carve its place in a national economy.

Son of an industrial chemist, Friedrich Bergius was born in what is now the Polish Corridor, became assistant to Fritz Haber who won a Nobel Prize for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. Bergius himself was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1931, now lives at Heidel- berg in close touch with its university.

Last week busy Nobelist Bergius bustled from Pittsburgh to Cambridge, Mass, to address the Harvard Tercentenary Conference on Arts & Sciences which got under way last fortnight (TIME, Sept. 14), continucd last week. At Cambridge, without going into much detail as to method, the German declared that he is getting a digestible sugar, equal in food value to barley, from sawdust, which is mostly a waste product or burned as an inferior fuel in lumber mills. Of the sawdust 60% to 65% becomes sugar, 5% acetic acid, 30% lignin which again can be used to make charcoal or wallboard. The sugar can be converted into protein by treatment with yeast; into fat by feeding it to pigs. Dr. Bergius said last week that, "for the present," food-from-wood is being fed to animals; he avoided saying that if Germany gets into a tough war it will be fed to humans.

Another figure spotlighted at the Pittsburgh meeting, which 3,000-odd chemists attended, was not a chemist at all but an old and frail man of high finance, diplomacy and government: Andrew William Mellon. Chemistry feels that it owes much to Pittsburgh's Mellon Institute of Industrial Research which will soon move into a huge, classic building girt by tall pillars.

This organization pays its own operating expenses with fees from manufacturers who want their technical problems to be tackled in the Institute's laboratories. In Andrew Mellon's pale thin fingers was placed a bronze plaque showing a young man in laboratory smock, holding up a test-tube and bestriding a smoky factory, with clouds in the shape of chemical retorts. Inscription: "The Pittsburgh Award to Andrew W. Mellon--For Outstanding Service to Chemistry. American Chemical Society, Pittsburgh Section." A similar award made posthumously to Brother Richard Beatty Mellon was received by his son, Richard King ("Dick") Mellon.

Other highlights of the Pittsburgh meeting:

Food Future. Dr. Edward Frankland Armstrong, president of the Association of British Chemical Manufacturers, said: "Food is the first of all the weapons of preventive medicine and it must be the function of the agriculturists in the near future to grow complete foods and not mere market produce. Life is so complex that we have forgotten how entirely food is its foundation and mainstay. We must discover what chemical substances in food, if any, can give intelligence, courage and alertness to the inhabitants of a city. Can we feed to produce nervous strength and agility in the same way we have learned to eat vitamins to prevent scurvy, pellagra, rickets and other diseases? . . .

"There is strong reason to believe that the findings of biochemistry and medicine will afford conclusive evidence that freshness in food is of paramount importance to a nation, so that there will be a national outcry both for the absolute maximum of home production and for production of vegetables contiguous to great cities."

Dangerous Molecule. Prime concern of physicists is the atom, of chemists the molecule. But whereas the batches of atoms created or transmuted by physicists cannot even be seen under the microscope, chemists now synthesize molecules after Nature's pattern in quantities that keep factories humming and salesmen humping. Molecules are groups of atoms which act as chemical units. The vast importance of molecular structure is well illustrated by the case of ozone, which is a modification of oxygen having three atoms in its molecule instead of the ordinary two. In the popular mind "ozone" has long been a synonym for pure and therefore beneficial air. Many a tuberculosis researcher has hoped it would prove helpful for lung treatments. Actually, the triple molecule of ozone is a deadly poison.

On the basis of six years' experiments, Professor Henry Barnett McDonnell, University of Maryland, reported last week that low concentrations of ozone shorten the lives of guinea pigs. "When inhaled in higher concentrations," he said, "it is a violent irritant of the mucous membranes and reacts chemically with the mucus to form a thick froth which . . . stops the air supply to the lungs almost completely in a minute or two."

Approach to Cortin. Dr. Harold Lawrence Mason and his associates at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota are trying to isolate, determine the chemical structure of, and eventually synthesize the potent hormone cortin, secreted by the suprarenal glands. Cortin maintains the potassium, sodium and urea balance of the blood; without it man develops Addison's disease and dies. Last week the Mayo researchers announced isolation of a pure crystalline substance which seems to be a close cousin of cortin. The crystal molecule contains 21 atoms of carbon, 28 of hydrogen, five of oxygen. It seems to have the same effect on animals as impure concentrations of the natural hormone, although more of the crystals are required.

Fusel OiL During Prohibition most U. S. drinkers came to regard "fusel oil" as an ingredient of unsavory whiskey and a cause of bad hangovers. Alluding to this idea with some irony last week, Industrial Chemist W. B. D. Penniman of Baltimore stated that fusel oil is the collective name for six complex alcohols which are the most important factor in determining the flavor of good whiskey. Usually they are present in percentages of only a few tenths of 1%. When a customer sued an Irish distiller for damages to his health from drinking whiskey which, he claimed, contained one quarter of 1% fusel oil, the distiller's analyst for three weeks disdainfully drank whiskey to which he added 2% of fusel oil to prove that it was harmless.

"Pontalite" is a new plastic, known chemically as methyl methacrylate polymer, which is as clear as optical glass, only half as heavy as common glass, flexible, non-shattering, able to withstand tensions of over four tons per square inch. It can be sawed, cut, drilled, polished, cast into molds. "The transparency, brilliance, strength and permanence of Pontalite are unusual, and the absence of color permits fabrication into delicate tinted shades."--Dr. Harry Robert Dittmar of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.

Chemical Education. "The young graduate comprehends too little of the economic aspects of his work. It is still true that industrialists must think in terms of income and outgo, in terms of sales revenue and costs. The student can hardly learn too soon that the dollar sign is an unwritten but potent factor in every industrial chemical education."--Emile F. du Pont, personnel manager of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.

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